COL. SMITH: Radiation … What did you find, Louis?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: I’d like to remind everyone that you can get some radioactive isotopes in your air just from burning too much coal. We’re going to have to give the eggheads more time to chew it over, eliminate other possible causes … but we are seeing isotopes like Cesium-133 and Iodine-131, and the radioisotope mass/yield curve suggests they came from prompt—not thermal—fission of Plutonium-239, and a bunch of thermal-neutron-induced fission of Uranium-238—
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: What does that mean?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: It’s fallout from an atmospheric H-bomb detonation. The Plutonium fission fragments came from the initiator and spark plug, the U-238 products come from the hohlraum. They—or someone on their time line—set off one or more thermonuclear devices quite recently. Less than a month ago, in fact, and it was probably in the hundred-kiloton-to-five-megaton range. This might indicate an active aboveground H-bomb test program. But the timing is right for them to have nuked our drones out of the sky.
DR. SCRANTON: We’re playing it close for now, gentlemen, but the White House is aware of the situation. A decision has been made, for better or worse. (pause) As of now, we’re treating this time line, time line 178, as a high-tech threat. It gets its own code name: BLACK RAIN, a hat tip to the fallout. While a National Security Order has been drafted and SAC are migrating a para-time-capable B-52 bomb wing armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to Thule just in case, the President has made it abundantly clear that this is a defensive posture only, not preparation for a first strike. She’s been briefed on Camp Singularity and is fully aware of the implications. She wants to play this very low-key, until we can provide some intel context on what we’re dealing with in BLACK RAIN. She doesn’t want to risk whacking a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat unless there’s no alternative.
COL. SMITH: This is what you were priming us for, isn’t it?
DR. SCRANTON: Yes, Colonel. I’m afraid we’ve run out of time. We’re going to keep probing with Tier 1 drones and micro-UAVs, but they can only get us so far; we badly need human eyes at ground level.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: But she’s not ready to deploy yet!
COL. SMITH: Leave that to me.
END TRANSCRIPT
UPSTATE NEW YORK, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020
That afternoon, Rita flew into Rochester on a Delta connection via Minneapolis. She was as tired and irritated as usual on arrival (she had been mildly disappointed to discover that her DHS staff ID card didn’t give her the right to magically sidestep the airport security lines or the scrum at the checked baggage belt); all she wanted to do was rent a car and drive out to the transit facility for Camp Graceland. She was not expecting to find Colonel Smith waiting for her in Arrivals, looking impatient. “Your flight is late.”
“Tell me about it, sir.” She’d worked out early on that calling him “sir” put the Colonel in a more receptive frame of mind. “You aren’t here just for me, are you?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. Walk this way. We need to talk.”
Rita tried to keep up with him while wrestling with three months’ worth of baggage. It was a futile battle, adding extra stress on top of her irritation and the layer of stifling paranoia added by the Colonel’s arrival. What does he want now? she wondered. She knew she hadn’t done well on the FBI course, but surely it would take something more important to drag the Colonel out of his office for the day?
Smith headed straight for the drop-off lane in front of the terminal, then paused for her to catch up. A gray government car nosed into the curb beside him; the trunk and doors sprang open. “Let me help you with that,” he said, taking Rita’s suitcase to her chagrin. “Get in—we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
It wasn’t exactly a luxury limo, but there was a privacy screen between the passengers and the driver up front. The Colonel climbed in beside her, fastened his seat belt, then rapped on the partition.
“You’re probably wondering if this is about the course,” he told her as the car moved off. “It’s not. What’s happened is—” He paused, then rummaged for a bottle of water in the storage bin the car featured in place of an armrest. “Want one? No? Okay. There’s been a major new development, and I’m rearranging your training and operational preparedness as a result.”
“New development?” Rita echoed.
“We thought we had a year to put you through the standard clandestine ops backgrounder. But events are outrunning us. The original plan was to certificate you for basic fieldwork, then assign you as a trainee analyst for a year or two, before looking into provisioning you for autonomous para-time deployment. Unfortunately”—he grimaced—“shit just got real. So we’re rescheduling everything.”
“What kind of shit? What rescheduling?”
Smith opened his water bottle and chugged it. “Sorry. You need to be able to world-walk. This may be a false alarm, in which case it’s back to training as usual. But we need you ready for deployment at short notice. You’re going to be in the clinic for a month—”
“Clinic? What clinic?” Rita realized her voice was shrill. “What does this involve?”
“No brain surgery.” Smith flashed her a nervous grin, evidently startled by her response. “No knives, nothing like that. Just a couple of injections. Hmm. Well, actually there is some surgery involved—on your left arm. I’m assuming you’re right-handed? It’s an implant to control the ability. But my understanding is that it’s pretty straightforward stuff, and once you’re in control you can take some leave, or go straight back to studying Spook 201. It’s just that it can take up to a month, and in a worst-case scenario we may not have a month in which to activate you when we need you.”
“Worst—” Rita stopped. “You’re going to turn me into a world-walker because you might need me at short notice?”
“Pretty much. Unfortunately I can’t tell you precisely why at this point. Let’s just say, we no longer have the luxury of giving you a lengthy training period. And for now let’s leave a big fat question mark over where and what it’s all about.”
Oh great. Rita tensed. Her head was beginning to ache. “Is this optional?”
The Colonel’s fey grin was equally tense: “Not really, no.”