Patrick snorted.
As it happened, nobody challenged Rita to her face. So after another week she deliberately slipped some tells into her classwork—showing more interest than was strictly necessary in the law surrounding undercover informers, or in evasion techniques used by terrorists. After that, a couple of the guys who had been avoiding her started to nod in passing. There were even some brief, guarded conversations in the canteen. They thought they had her pigeonholed. It made life a little more bearable, which she came to appreciate as the physical regime and long classroom hours ground down on her. It didn’t break the ice all around: for some people her skin would always mark her out as other. But it wasn’t only her skin that was the problem—simple racism would have been stamped on, hard, by the instructors. By week six she was coming to suspect that the real problem was in her head.
Rita was lonely, an introvert exposed to an extrovert culture. She could fake it in the classroom and exercises by putting on a front, just like she could act on stage. But the continual effort over a period of weeks left her scant energy for socializing in the evenings; nor was the prospect of barroom bonding with sheriffs from small towns and lieutenants from big-city forces remotely appealing to her. The cultural chasm she perceived when she looked at her classmates was dizzying. They’d chosen a career in law enforcement. She was something else, so different that she felt like a fraud—not through any kind of criminal inclination, but because where they saw things in red and blue she saw an infinite range of purples.
The graduate-level coursework she could focus on; the fitness regime was a weak point. But if she failed at anything, it was the networking and team building.
Finally, after ten weeks, the ordeal was over. She said her abbreviated goodbyes to classmates who had remained strangers throughout, and slunk back to Camp Graceland with her tail between her legs.
“Good luck with your Mission: Impossible assignment, wherever they send you,” said Martina, her course director, a grizzled FBI senior agent turned teacher. “You didn’t fool anybody, by the way,” she added with a smile. “But we don’t mind. I just hope you got whatever your handlers sent you here for.”
Surgical Intervention
BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, MAY 2020
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004910023 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
DR. SCRANTON: I have some bad news for you gentlemen. We lost another drone to the anomalous time line yesterday. That’s time line 178. Situation’s escalating.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Fuck.
COL. SMITH: Louis, what can you tell us about it?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Mission three was flown by an RQ-4 DarkStar. It departed from Wright-Patterson AFB at 1620 local time, then headed south until it crossed over water, topped up from an Air Force tanker, and climbed to flight level 700. Once at cruise altitude it triggered its ARMBAND unit to take it to the destination time line via time line one, and that’s all we know. It’s more than a day past its minimum fuel reserve time, so we’re calling it a definite hull loss.
COL. SMITH: Wait a minute. If this was mission three, what were the first two?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: We followed the usual protocol for newly opened indirect-access time lines: a ground-level atmospheric sample-return box to confirm the presence of air and gravity, then mapping using MQ-1 Predators. They fly in daylight at medium altitude, with cameras set up to perform a wide-area survey of the eastern seaboard area. They were expecting business as usual: an uninhabited wasteland or, at most, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. But neither of them came back, and after two hull losses in a row, some bright spark decided to up the ante. The RQ-4 is a high-altitude stealth drone, sort of an unmanned U-2 analog. And it’s now overdue. Never showed up. Didn’t activate its DOOMWATCH device, either—
DR. SCRANTON: DOOMWATCH?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: It’s a special ARMBAND unit—a world-walking machine—with a flight data recorder attached. It’s switched on right before the drone transitions to its target time line and logs all the telemetry from the drone’s flight control system and instruments. If the drone does anything unpredictable, DOOMWATCH ejects and transitions back to the home time line immediately, then pops a parachute. That way, if there’s no breathable atmosphere or the UAV encounters a thunderstorm or some other irrecoverable situation, at least we get an idea of what happened.
DR. SCRANTON: So you got a positive for atmosphere and gravity using the preliminary sample return box, but then lost three drones in a row. The last of them a high-altitude stealth machine. But the Air Force aren’t totally stupid—
COL. SMITH: Thank you!
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Indeed. So this morning we sent up a sacrificial Tier 1 UAV, a Gnat 750, programmed to bounce over to time line one, continue to time line 178, buzz around at five hundred feet for a while, then phone home. The first three drones were real aircraft, things that need a runway and ground crew; the Gnat is a toy with a ten-foot wingspan that you launch off the back of a jeep. Anyway, it came back bang on schedule. Its meteorology package said conditions over there were fine, too.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Shit.
COL. SMITH: The scatological commentary is getting old, Barney.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Sorry. It’s been a bad week.
DR. SCRANTON: If you’ve quite finished?
COL. SMITH: Sorry, sir. Please continue.
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Well, we picked up something interesting from the Gnat. They sent it up from McGuire AFB in New Jersey, not Wright-Patterson, and it hedge-hopped around Pennsylvania for an hour, and here are some of its holiday snaps.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Holy—sorry.
COL. SMITH: Well, isn’t that interesting.
DR. SCRANTON: The cat is out of the bag, gentlemen.
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: (pointing) That’s a railroad switchyard. And here’s some kind of industrial plant—a factory, we think, but this is preliminary. That definitely looks like an ore conveyor, though—
COL. SMITH: Yes. So we have heavy industry for sure, and we can infer the existence of air defenses. Possibly even defenses that can take out an RQ-4. (pause) Has anyone briefed NCA yet? NSC? The Joint Chiefs?
DR. SCRANTON: There’s worse to come.
COL. SMITH: Oh dear.
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: I hadn’t got to the air samples yet. They show a surprisingly low level of PM10 and PM50 particulates, which mostly come from diesel engines. This tends to suggest that they use all-electric traction on their railroads. But then there’s the radiation issue.