“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. Electricity, 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.