“Uh-huh.” Rita stared at Patrick’s rock and scrap collection. “So what’s the plan?”
“The plan is to build out our knowledge of the target time line, starting with somewhere relatively safe. We know there’s a railroad yard, so we want you to go through there at night and scatter sensors around a couple of key areas without being seen. The first mission will be a double-jaunt into the switchyard via a place you do not want to linger in. It’ll be a quick in-and-out, fifteen minutes max. We leave the sensors in place for a day, then you go back to collect them. That gives us a preliminary site survey, so we can pick a better insertion site for the next mission, when you will plant hidden cameras and mikes on platforms and offices. We need to know a whole lot more—what language they speak, whether it’s related to any that we know, what their writing looks like, what they wear, their ethnicity or physical appearance—before we can develop a covert program.”
“An entire program?” It was a daunting prospect. “But I’m just one woman, what can I—”
“You’re the spearhead for BLACK RAIN,” Patrick interrupted. His expression was serious. “That’s the code word for this operation, to investigate this time line. We need you to spy out the lay of the land. Your goal is to establish a toehold, learn the basics, and finally identify a safe location on the other side where we can drop non-world-walkers. Then they can take over the heavy lifting. Once we’ve established a transfer gate you won’t be needed there again—but we’ll probably want to do the same thing elsewhere. Maybe even overseas.”
Rita stared at the rocks apprehensively. “What if they discover the rocks?”
“They’ll be disguised as track ballast. Over here we lay three thousand tons of the stuff per mile of track. Even if they figure out there’s a bug in the ballast, searching a switchyard for passive transponders would be like looking for needles in a haystack the size of Iowa. You’ll only be able to find them yourself because we’ll give you a signaling device that can make them flash an infrared LED for your night vision goggles.”
“And if they have infrared floodlights and CCTV, like an Amtrak depot?”
Patrick shook his head. “Then you cut and run, and we have a very big headache. Rita, our number one priority here is to get you back safely. Never doubt that! Because you can tell us far more about what’s going on than any dumb sensor.”
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.