Rita tried to make it work inside her head. “Okay, so … Say we’ve got a surveyed location. At the designated time I suit up, cross over to the, the switchyard, drop a bunch of rocks, plant a couple of bits of debris on suitable cabs if I see anything, then come back. Is that it?”
“Yes. It’ll be a walk in the park—just like the Apollo astronauts had.” Patrick seemed tired. To Rita’s eyes he looked like he’d been working overtime for too many nights. “You’ll be wearing body armor and a night vision system. And you’ll have a bunch of cameras strapped to your helmet, along with inertial sensors—it’ll be like one of those HaptoTech motion capture systems you worked with, so we can put together a virtual map of the yard after you come back. But that’s about it. We’ve arranged for a trainer from the Federal Railroad Administration to come in after lunch to give you a basic safety briefing on what hazards you can expect in a switchyard. There are no guarantees that they do things the same way we do, but we can make some approximate guesses based on the photographs—their track and loading gauge, maximum track curvature and length of railroad cars—which tell us things like how fast and how heavy their trains are. Oh, and the switch layout and siding geometry tells us how they load and unload stuff. But I’d better leave that to the FRA guy. And then after his briefing I’m sure you’ll want to sack out.”
“Why? You’re planning on sending me through tonight?” she asked, half joking: They can’t possibly be in that much of a hurry …
“Yes. At three-fifteen precisely.”
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO; IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
At ten past three in the morning Rita shifted her weight uneasily from one knee to the other. They were standing around in the middle of a parking lot behind the windowless warehouse unit the Unit had appropriated. Rita, Patrick, a cluster of technicians, a pair of armorers, the peripatetic DHS agents Sonia Gomez and Jack Mercer—Rita had finally achieved a high enough security clearance to learn his surname—and a bunch of uniformed officers had established a secure perimeter around the entire block, thereby ensuring that every undesirable within a fifty-mile radius knew something was going down.
After the afternoon briefing on how not to lose life or limbs to a bump-shunted boxcar, Rita had crashed out until ten o’clock. But now she was awake, pumped high on bad coffee and strapped into a mall ninja’s parody version of a James Bond outfit. The ensemble consisted of boots, black BDUs, armor, and a mad-scientist helmet that sprouted VR glasses, a lifelogger, and a pair of night vision scopes cantilevered off the front. She lacked only a scary-looking gun to fit the part perfectly—but although Patrick had asked if she wanted a pistol, she’d declined: “First, I don’t know if I could shoot anyone, and second, if I did it would totally fuck the mission, wouldn’t it?”
“Right answer,” he’d told her. “If you see any sign of trouble, you jaunt away immediately. If we luck out, anyone who sees you will think they were hallucinating. But you don’t want to be seen. Got that?”
“Got it.” She’d nodded queasily, her head unbalanced by the helmet-mounted protrusions. Meanwhile the support team was laying out her planned ground track on the asphalt using crime scene tape. “Walk me through this again? Headset, capture map on.”
That had been a couple of hours ago. Since then they’d run through endless checklists, made her replay her choreographed series of steps in the head-up display of her glasses three times (following them in real time so that it became a habit to step within her own ghostly footsteps), and updated the folks “upstairs,” who were waiting with the Colonel in a committee room somewhere in Maryland. And now, Rita’s bladder was embarrassingly full.
“This is going to sound stupid,” she said apologetically, “but I really need to go to the bathroom.”
“You need to go? Can’t it wait—” Gomez sounded disgusted, but Patrick cut her off: “Let her go.” He glanced at Rita. “Just don’t take too long.”
Rita scuttled through the open door of the warehouse unit like a black-clad cockroach, making a beeline for the ground-floor restroom. Her bladder was full: coffee and nerves were a potent combination. Her stomach was also full of butterflies. I can do this, she told herself, self-consciously self-aware. It’s just another role. Front of stage. Your name in lights. “Today’s late-night billing: secret agent woman Rita Douglas in, in … BLACK RAIN.”
She made it back to the taped-out departure zone with two minutes to spare. “Stand there,” said Gomez.
“System check.”
Rita looked at the transparent cutout in the forearm of her left sleeve. She squeezed a now-familiar pattern, then switched on the ultraviolet light above her helmet visor. Phosphorescence glimmered against the darkness of her skin. “Test pattern works, GFP phosphenes work, black-light lamp works.” She looked straight forward through her night vision eyepieces. “Night vision works.” Her mouth was dry.
“One minute to go,” called Patrick.
Rita looked around, then cued up her captured choreography in a window at the side of her glasses. She felt curiously trapped, hot even though it was a cool night. The moon had set—
“Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten. Five—”
She focused on her trigger engram, and jaunted.
Rita stumbled among trees in the darkness. A night rain was falling, pattering off leaves overhead: the air smelled overwhelmingly green. Damn: obstacles, she realized. She’d been lucky to come out between them. Trying to jaunt into the same place as a solid object was impossible, but the shock it gave her was like brief contact with a live wire. Or the jolting sensation of falling on the edge of sleep.
In her ear, mingling with the leafy rustling and the dripping of rain on trees, she heard the clicking of a radiation counter. Time line one was still hot from the nuking of the Gruinmarkt. She took a deep breath of forest air, squeezed to summon the next trigger engram in the sequence—dim green phosphorescent fireflies glowed on the back of her wrist, shimmering as they shifted into a tantalizingly not-quite-familiar knotwork design—and she jaunted again.
This time she slipped, feet sliding on sharp-edged, rough pebbles. The air on her face was warmer. She looked around: a tall wall rose beside her. It was right in the path of her programmed dance step through the switchyard. She blinked, focusing. It’s a shipping container, she realized. A shipping container on a flatbed wagon. I need to capture this. It looked, ironically, just like any other shipping container she’d ever seen: forty feet of corrugated steel with twist-lock connectors at each corner. It loomed above her like a wall, with another container stacked atop it. The wagon bed rose above the bogies at either end.
“Shit,” Rita muttered under her breath. The bed of the wagon left barely a two-foot gap above the track, and the man from the FRA had taken considerable pains to impress on her the un-wisdom of crawling around under a railroad wagon. She turned round. The next set of tracks gleamed empty in the starlight. “Headset, new capture map, on.” She was about to step across the tracks when there was a dull thudding sound behind her, and the container jerked.
Rita dived for cover. Lying on her stomach, heart pounding, she forced herself to turn her head sideways. The train began to move, with a squeaking and squealing of steel wheels on rails and a clatter of chains. As it inched past, only feet away, she reached into her sling bag and found some of the false ballast. One she threw past her head; another she planted in the direction of her feet. Then she grabbed hold of the transponder rock, ready for the fake two-by-four.
A bogie inched slowly past, wheels grating harshly. Then another slid into view. She looked up. Lettering stood out in ghostly silhouette on the steel flank of the container: IRONGATE IMPORTS INCORPORATED.
Breathing deeply, Rita tried to control her shakes. The terror that had sunk its icy claws into her began to subside. A flash of blue-white light, bright as lightning, flickered in the distance above the track. She looked up and saw a gantry spanning six or seven tracks, with cables slung beneath it. Electricit
y, she thought dismally. I could be electrocuted as well as crushed. With a primal bump-thump, the stacked container wagon jolted across a track weld as it passed her. Another rolled past, then a third. Finally the end of the sliding wall of metal came into view. A small shunting locomotive, unlike anything she recognized from back home, pushed the string of freight wagons forward. It was small only in comparison to its gargantuan payload: the bottom of the cab door had to be at least six feet above the rails. A pantograph buzzed atop its roof, occasionally sparking. I am so not messing with that, Rita decided. As it slid past, she saw an opportunity to resume her aborted sequence of dance moves: so she stood up, and followed her ghostly footsteps across the switchyard.
She crossed six tracks, distributing surveillance pebbles. At the next track she landed a prize: another of the shunting engines sat stationary and dark, pantograph lowered. She cautiously reached up and slid the two-by-four with the concealed mapper atop the walkway around the loco’s transformers, then looked around. “I’m out of targets,” she told the lifelogger. “I’m going to have a look-round. Countdown timer for five minutes, please.”
Standing in the shadow of the shunter, she slowly scanned the visible horizon of the yard. Strings of container wagons lay parked in sidings. The train she’d seen before was rolling steadily now, clattering across points. A long, low maintenance shed blocked her view in one direction. Another parked train concealed the other horizon, but for a control tower looming above it. Lights burned in the distance: blue and green and red. Farther off, amber floodlights splashed a bright sodium-glare across the tracks, almost washing out her sensitive night vision goggles.
Rita felt a sudden, vertiginous wash of perspective. Had she world-walked at all, or merely teleported to another location in Pennsylvania? It was hard to tell. It was—
A momentary thought struck her, lodged quivering in her mind. That’s odd, she thought. The tracks are too far apart, aren’t they? She looked in both directions carefully, then stepped between the nearest rails. Kneeling, she stretched her right hand out to touch the inner edge of the track on that side. “Lifelogger, bookmark this. Headset, new capture map, pin to right hand.” She held her arm out, stiff, as she touched the rail, then swung round until it touched inside the other rail. “Lifelogger, bookmark this. It should give us the track gauge, near enough. Next time I’ll bring a tape measure.” She stood again, feeling momentarily dizzy, just as the timer she’d set beeped softly for attention. “Okay, time to go home now.”
She retraced her steps and jaunted twice in succession, confident that her first mission had been a success.
BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004930391 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
DR. SCRANTON: So what did we learn from our first HUMINT foray into BLACK RAIN? Colonel?
COL. SMITH: We got lucky.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Why, was there an unanticipated risk?
COL. SMITH: Yes. We nearly lost Rita. Stumbling around a railway switchyard at night after the moon’s set is a risky business! She put a good face on it, but I replayed the motion capture log and she came this close to falling under a moving freight train.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Jesus.
DR. SCRANTON: No oaths, please. We’re on the record.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Sorry.
COL. SMITH: Thank you. Luckily for us she made a good recovery, and after the train passed she distributed the sensor nodes exactly as instructed. Afterward she went for a ten-minute stroll to get her bearings, then came back. She stayed within the remit of her instructions at all times. I’m entirely satisfied with the way she conducted herself.
DR. SCRANTON: Okay. Findings?
COL. SMITH: This is where it gets disturbing. Firstly, they use intermodal freight containers just like ours. They’re too like ours: for one thing they’re labeled in English—
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: That doesn’t sound possible. You’re sure?
DR. SCRANTON: Yes, definitely. Rita didn’t get a close look at much, but her helmet cams picked up stuff she missed. All the text in the frame uses the Latin alphabet and conforms to anglophone spelling rules. There wasn’t much of it, mind you, and it was night. But there was enough evidence.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Could it be another version of our, our time line? A close cousin?
COL. SMITH: That’s what we thought at first. But Rita’s a smart kid. She thought there was something wrong with the tracks, so she knelt down and used her motion capture instrumentation to measure the gauge—the gap between the rails—exactly. We run on standard gauge—four feet, eight and a half inches. Rita measured their gauge at five feet, one inch, plus or minus an inch or so. Now, that might be Pennsylvania broad gauge—the Pittsburgh and West Penn Railways ran on a five-foot, two-and-a-half gauge—but we’ve never used those for container freight lines. Those railroads went bust in 1952 and 1964, respectively. So even if this is a kissing-cousin time line, it almost certainly diverged more than sixty years ago.
DR. SCRANTON: Good work. What else do we know?
COL. SMITH: They use overhead current and electric traction for freight shunters. So they electrified their heavy rail freight network, like in Europe or the new Chinese and Indian systems. But there’s more. Rita glimpsed what we presume to be signal lights, but they don’t follow the usual color convention—red, yellow, and green. These used blue. Nobody we know uses blue light signals.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Oh sh—sorry, gentlemen. This changes everything, doesn’t it?
COL. SMITH: I don’t see why. If they haven’t got world-walkers, they can’t touch us. And if they do have world-walkers, then as soon as they learn about us they’ll infer our ability to generate a second-strike retaliatory capability: a bomb wing of B-52s out of Thule should be enough keep them from getting frisky.
DR. SCRANTON: That’s above our pay grade, gentlemen. What else have we learned?
COL. SMITH: A lot of fine detail about the layout of a rail freight switchyard near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Nothing else, as yet. Unless you say otherwise, I’m sending her back over again tonight. Mission objective this time round will be to do an initial data retrieval from the sensor net she installed, then to plant optical imagers and audio pickups somewhere more useful. I want to target the station platform and offices. We want to confirm that they speak English, and if so what sort of accent they have. We want to get a good look at their clothing, demographics, and security protocols. It’s all essential legwork before we send Rita on an actual undercover mission: basic know-your-enemy stuff.
DR. SCRANTON: Do you have any recommendations you’d like to add, Colonel? Anything for me to pass up the chain?
COL. SMITH: Yes, I do. These people might be our long-lost cousins, but they’ve had at least sixty years of divergence, and they’ve got nukes, and they’ve shot down three of our drones. They’re dangerously competent, if not just plain dangerous. Imagine how we’d respond if parties unknown began probing us with drones, then sent world-walking HUMINT assets to check us out. We’d shit a brick, assume the worst, and reach for the big stick.
DR. SCRANTON: So you’re saying we should exercise extreme caution.
COL. SMITH: That’s exactly it, ma’am. Because if we don’t, someone’s going to get burned, and it might be us.
END TRANSCRIPT
NEAR PHOENIX, TIME LINE TWO, MAY 2020
The federal government took justifiable pride in the comprehensive scope of its communication traffic monitoring activities. It was, without doubt, a best-of-breed program. Every phone call’s end point was logged. Every e-mail was tracked. And quite possibly the NSA’s vast server farms were converting those phone calls into text and indexing them for future recovery. The Internet was totally surveilled, and the Internet of things—everything with an Internet connection, from toaster ovens to televisions—was also surveilled. Every fatphone’s or cell phone’s location was monitored as its owner moved around and it switched between cell towers for better
reception. Every automobile and truck and bicycle notified the Federal Highway Administration of its location, the better to prevent interstate commerce crime. And every city block in every town with more than ten thousand souls boasted a high-definition webcam on every street corner, monitoring pedestrian and vehicle traffic.
Kurt Douglas, for his part, found it a never-ending source of wry amusement. The diminishing marginal utility of information had been a vexatious nuisance to the Stasi—the East German secret police—back in his youth. The more you knew, the more chaff you had to process with your wheat. The more true positives you had for dissent, the more false positives you had to eliminate. False positives who were good citizens falsely accused would, even if cleared, be ruined—their hearts dead to the cause. Subtle secret policemen walked softly and exercised a feather-light touch until they were certain of their prey; unfortunately by its nature the profession offered an attractive career to crude authoritarians.
The soul of the American surveillance machine was just as drab and bureaucratic-gray as the East German system he’d grown up under. And it recorded everything. For example, every parcel and letter and postcard passing through the USPS network was photographed digitally, sniffed for drugs and explosives, pinged for illicit memory chips, and scanned for radio-frequency ID tags. Quite possibly they were also shotgun-sampled for matches against the National DNA Prime Suspects Database.
But there were blind spots on the panopticon’s retina. The Post Office, for example, still offered prompt, reliable delivery of data—and it was possible to defeat the NSA and DHS data mining if you understood how to use it. It wasn’t rocket science. All you had to do was leave your phone at home, dress in clothing from which all the RFID washing machine instruction tags had been stripped, and go for a walk. You had to make sure you passed two or more postal boxes while carrying a suitably sanitized letter—addressed to your recipient by name but showing the address of a neighbor the recipient was on speaking terms with. The panopticon couldn’t distinguish between mail pickup boxes, and a misplaced digit would disguise the destination. Network analysis—looking for friends-of-friends relationships—would eventually crack a postal ring, but first they had to know there was something to look for. And to muddy the waters, there was always geocaching: the old tradecraft practices of dead letter drops, cutouts, and codes, turned into a hobby for the masses.
Empire Games Series, Book 1 Page 22