“But you—” Rita paused for a moment, assessing her next words carefully. “You grabbed me at zero notice and I’ve only been training for a few months. Did something go wrong? Or were you watching me before?”
“Yes to both.” Smith leaned forward. “JAUNT BLUE is very new. You’re the first recipient. It only works on non-world-walking descendants of the, the Clan. And we don’t have many of them. If we’d known we’d have it five years ago, you’d probably have been contacted in college, steered toward the right degree. And we’d still be sitting here right now, but you’d be fully trained and cognizant of the reasons for what we’re doing. As it is, though, you’re barely one step above a raw recruit. To make matters worse, we’re completely in the dark about the target society. So we desperately need clandestine resources. You are all we’ve got, and some people I report to who you do not need to know about do not believe we can rely on you. I’d like to prove them wrong, but not at the cost of a blown operation and a dead agent. That would be you.”
It hit her like a bucket of cold water in the face. “There’s no one else yet?” He shook his head, lips pursed. “How long until…?”
“Three years, minimum.”
“But I’m—” She stopped. “Why so long?”
“We have a very limited pool of JAUNT BLUE candidates, Rita. You’re the oldest.”
“I’m the oldest?”
He spoke slowly at first. “Your birth mother and her mother were Clan runaways. There may be other deserters, but despite looking hard we haven’t found them yet. As for the rest … there’s a pool of inactive Q-machine carriers. The Clan were using a fertility clinic in Massachusetts to breed children carrying the trait by the thousand. We found a copy of the breeding program records: but the oldest of the cohort are just turning twenty-one now.”
“So that’s why you sank all that money into JAUNT BLUE?”
Smith nodded. “Spending half a billion dollars on one agent wouldn’t make much sense, would it? But if as many as five percent of the Clan’s breeding program clear their background checks and join up, we’ll have the nucleus of a decent clandestine para-temporal intelligence service in five to ten years’ time.”
“But I’m a, a prototype?”
“Yes.”
“And the Clan tried to snatch me off the street because of my birth mother.”
“Yes.” Smith paused for a fraction of a second too long. Gotcha, Rita thought sourly. “It’s the first hint we’ve had in seventeen years that she may have survived.”
“Survived what?”
His gaze focused beyond her again, on some unseen vista of historic failure: “Let’s just say, mistakes were made in the lead-up to 7/16.”
Rita froze, riveted. “Does that mean what I think it does?”
Smith refocused on her. “The CIA were in contact with Osama bin Laden before 2001, you know. But that doesn’t mean they were responsible for 9/11. Nor were the Clan an accidental creation of ours. They didn’t give us any concrete demands or try to negotiate before they bombed the White House: I want you to be very clear on that. We stumbled on them and tried to shut them down, and they attacked us with stolen demolition nukes. Escalated straight to mass murder. They left President Rumsfeld no option other than to respond in kind.”
Rita shied away from thinking about it too hard. There’d been rolling video footage for weeks all over the TV and Internet when she was eight. First, the Washington Monument toppling on a shock wave, a fiery cloud rising where the White House had been. Then a month later, the horrors of New Delhi and Islamabad: when the news of world-walking broke, the cold war between India and Pakistan had abruptly turned nuclear. World War 2.5 they’d called it afterwards. Finally, unrolling beneath a camera mounted in the tail of a high-altitude US Air Force bomber, the TV news brought home the US government’s revenge on the world-walkers’ home time line. A field of ghastly flaming mushroom clouds had risen in parallel lines, spanning the horizon and bisecting the pale neck of history like a blow from a headsman’s axe.
“You’ve seen Camp Singularity, and the dome and the Gate,” Colonel Smith nudged her mercilessly toward the precipice. “What happened there was even worse than 7/16. Rita, the forerunners may be dead, or they may still be out there. We don’t know. They may be connected with the Clan world-walkers. Again, we don’t know. The JAUNT BLUE Q-machines didn’t evolve naturally, that’s for sure. What we do know, via mitochondrial DNA studies of captured Clan members, is that they all share a common ancestor who lived less than two and a half centuries ago. From what we know of the Clan’s world they could no more build Q-machines than Benjamin Franklin could build an H-bomb. So all the evidence points to a high-technology para-time civilization that was active in the recent historic past. We think the Clan may actually be descended from a deserter or runaway from that civilization—like your birth grandmother—but as I said, we just don’t know for sure.”
Without realizing she was doing it, Rita had raised her left fist to her mouth: now she found herself gnawing on her knuckles. “So you found them. That’s what this is all about.”
“We don’t know,” Smith said gently. “We want you to find out.”
“If they’re the Clan’s ancestors? Or, or the forerunners? Or their enemies?”
“They might be any of the above, or something else entirely. We don’t know. All we know is that we opened up a new time line recently. This one was accessible via those parts of time line one—the Clan’s former home—that don’t still glow in the dark. Which suggests a Clan connection. We lost three reconnaissance drones in rapid succession when we started trying to map it. But the fourth drone survived and brought back some highly-suggestive photographs.”
“Another dome?”
“Nothing so high-tech. It looks like a big railway freight switchyard, near the site of downtown Allentown on our time line. On the outskirts of Philly. There are buildings and probably a city as well, but it’s not ours.”
“Railway freight—” Rita frowned, puzzling over the drip of data. “But so far all the time lines we’ve found have been uninhabited or Stone Age, haven’t they? Apart from Camp Singularity.”
“Yes.” Smith gave her an encouraging smile. “Pretend you’re a fully trained analyst. What does that tell you?”
“The forerunners built the Gate. They had unimaginable powers. Still, it’s hard to see them building railroads, isn’t it?”
“Carry on.”
“But … a freight yard?” The dust of history classes stirred in her memory. “That means they’re industrialized. They’ve got steam locomotives, at a minimum, and enough factories and stuff to need heavy rail freight? And we still use rail freight for shipping goods around. Hang on. We lost three drones?”
Smith nodded again, seeing the horror dawning in her widening eyes. “Carry on.”