“T minus one minute,” some idiot intoned into a bullhorn, fancying himself the ringmaster.
Rita flipped her night vis goggles down, then squeezed her left forearm carefully. Oh Angie, she thought, please let it not just be my imagination that you—
“Thirty seconds—”
She forced herself back into focus. “Lifelogger, go to maximum bandwidth, record everything, and journal to backpack,” she muttered into her throat mike. “Over.” Then she jaunted, twice in rapid succession.
This time she thought she knew what to expect of the rail yard. So she kept her balance, swung her helmet-mounted glasses round in a circle to take in the tracks, recording everything like a good Girl Scout.
There were trains, but none of them were moving. Dim starlight gleamed off a distant fence. A faint breeze raised whispers in the overhead wires, and the station buildings formed indistinct black silhouettes on the far side of the tracks. “Headset, new capture map. Bookmark current.” She squatted, then hit the release on her backpack.
A hefty Peli case thudded to the ground behind her. She turned, squatted, and flipped it open. Dim LEDs began to blink as the data logger began to ping the scattered surveillance devices she’d planted before the weekend. Now she opened the flap covering the other half of the case. Four gunmetal bird-shapes nestled within like legless, beakless pigeons with synthetic sapphire eyes: Raytheon birds that laid Rockwell eggs. She lifted them one at a time, unplugged their charge cables, and ran through the checklist on her head-up display, then stood back as they spread their carbon-fiber wings and lofted into the night.
Once the micro-UAVs had flown, Rita did another 360 turn. There was nobody in sight: it was as quiet as a graveyard. She flipped the Peli case closed, then armed the dead man’s switch. If all went to plan, she’d pick it up on her return journey. If not, it had a world-walking ARMBAND unit of its own and would jaunt home in two hours. “Set timer to one hour forty-five.”
She didn’t like to think about what they would do if the base station went home without her. She’d tried to ask Colonel Smith, but he’d flatly changed the subject, not even bothering to evade. “You know better than to ask questions like that.” He’d looked pained, as if she’d turned up to a test without studying for it.
She’d swallowed. “You know I’ll come home on schedule unless, unless for some reason I can’t. Aren’t you supposed to offer me a cyanide capsule or something? In case I’m captured and tortured?”
“You won’t be,” he said, with calm reassurance that in retrospect gave her the cold shivers. “We’re monitoring you via the telemetry return module. And your wearable diagnostics”—the harness of electrodes taped to her skin, under her clothes. “If you glimpse someone, you jaunt home. If you fall and break a leg, you jaunt home. If someone shoots at you, you jaunt home. If the locals capture you—and they won’t if you’ve done the other things right—you jaunt home. Your only excuse for not jaunting home is that you’re dead, in which case the JAUNT BLUE program is suspended. The question of what happens after that is one for the National Security Council. It’s not my job or yours to second-guess them.”
Casting around with her grainy noise-speckled green starlight scopes, Rita discerned no signs of motion. Looking down, she stepped across the first track, knelt, and used the right angle and laser range finder from her right thigh pocket to measure the interrail gap. Five feet, two inches precisely. Keeping her feet on the stony ballast between the sleepers, avoiding contact with the rails, she made her way across the switchyard toward the darkened signal house. Hulking transformers buzzed quietly in a fenced-in cantonment not far from the building, stacked insulators feeding fat cables up to an overhead gantry. Smell of damp wood, oil and ozone, distant trees. Odor of dirt, a slight sulfurous tickle at the back of the throat. An external wooden staircase ran up to the entrance to the signal box on the second floor. It was built of red brick, stained black with soot, and the paint around the window frames was peeling.
She scanned her environs again, then carefully checked the wall outside the signal box. Telegraph wires led under the eaves, or maybe they were low-voltage power cables—not the heavy traction current from the substation behind the fence—but there were no obvious signs of external alarms. The door at the top of the stairs was wooden, paneled, and secured with a bulky hasp and padlock.
“This isn’t a forerunner time line,” she said quietly, trusting the telemetry return module to capture her words for posterity. “Use of wood, brick, and natural materials. It’s closer to—”
There was a sign by the side of the signal box door. Without thinking, she climbed the steps until she was close enough to read it. It was made of embossed metal: rust spots showed through the enameled paint surface.
“Sign in English. Lifelogger, bookmark this.” She peered closer. “Eastern Imperial Permanent Way Rules and Regulations. Employees only. Trespassers will be Att—Attaindered. Maximum penalty, uh, squiggle fifty slash dash.” Excitement—I can read this! They speak English! Sort of—vied with disappointment—Oh, I can read this, it’s just English.
She hadn’t brought a lock-pick kit, and she wasn’t proficient enough to waste time fumbling around in the dark with a padlock on a semi-derelict-looking building. She contented herself by gumming a webcam up against one of the panes of glass in the door, where it would have a decent view of everyone working in the building by daylight (and the glass could act as a resonant surface for its mike). Then she descended the stairs and made for the platform with the station office, four tracks away. Her blood was humming in her ears: quick darting glances told her she was still alone.