The station building was a long, low, single-story structure with a gently sloping roof, sitting on a raised platform island between two tracks—it was clearly designed for passenger trains. Rita guessed its length at about five hundred feet, short by US standards per the briefing from the FRA guy. Do they use it to bring in the switchyard crew, she wondered, or do they run short commuter trains? Daylight and webcams would tell. She duck-walked along the track bed, checking for signs of activity in the building, then climbed the steps at the end of the platform. It was the work of a minute to climb atop some kind of low retaining wall sized for trolleys or supplies and to stick a couple of webcams to one of the supports of the long station canopy. Then she worked her way along the platform.
Rita came to what looked to be a waiting room or ticket office, shuttered against the night. There were posters on the wall outside in glass-fronted frames, just like a station at home. There was a timetable: she scanned it carefully at close range, trusting that the list of unfamiliar destinations would be meaningful to some back-office analyst. Other public information notices. She forced herself to glance at them quickly, but not allow herself to become absorbed. Some were strikingly familiar, as if they were a glimpse of home as seen through a semantic fun-house mirror. DEMOCRACY IS ENDANGERED: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, TELL SOMEONE. That could almost have come from home. But then she came to another: LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION! EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY, LIBERTY. And below it, in smaller lettering, DOWN WITH ROYALISM.
Hang on, she thought, her perspective expanding dizzyingly, the rusting sign on the signal box door … It had said something about an “Imperial Permanent Way.” And now this: DOWN WITH ROYALISM. What does it mean?
She came to another locked platform door, beside a window. And for once the window wasn’t shuttered. It was an office, looking out on the platform. Rita peeped inside: there was no sign of life. With her low-powered flashlight, she lit up the room within until her night glasses could see clearly—barely a single lumen sufficed. There were swivel chairs of heavy wood and brass with leather seats, and green metal-topped desks. File cabinets loomed against one wall. A tall electric fan with villainously sharp-looking blades hulked over the largest desk like a frozen mantis. The desk was crowded, with several in-trays and an old-school computer. Paydirt, she realized, and climbed atop a platform bench seat to affix another webcam to the glass, looking in.
Then she glanced down at the desk and realized what she had seen but not registered.
There was a computer on the desk. It was an old-school bulky beige box with a metal cover, not a tablet or a flat display panel. A keyboard you could club someone to death with sat proudly in the middle of the blotter, but something about it didn’t quite look right. She fumbled for a moment with her webbing, then managed to pull out the super-zoom camera. “Come on, damn you,” she muttered under her breath. The autofocus didn’t want to work in darkness. She glanced around, nervously, then switched the flash to automatic and squeezed her eyes shut as she depressed the shutter button. Then she zoomed in on the image she’d captured. It was a keyboard, all right, but the key layout was all wrong. The keys weren’t staggered; there were too many columns and not enough rows. I guess we’re not in QWERTY City anymore, she told herself.
She was still boggling at the museum exhibits when the platform light came on.
PART THREE
DARK STATE
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
—Karl Marx
Extraction
THE COMMONWEALTH, TIME LINE THREE, MAY 2020
Miriam and Erasmus spent a night in the bunker waiting for the bombs to fall, drinking bad coffee and grinding through a crisis agenda inconclusively.
Elsewhere, hundreds of pilots spent the night keyed up and sleepless in the cockpits of their nuclear-armed interceptors, wondering if this time the French were finally coming. And they were not alone, for the Commonwealth War Command responded to the uncertain threat in accordance with the age-old syllogism of the uncertain; something must be done, this is something, therefore this must be done.
Petard carriers—bombers—and their escort tankers scrambled, then flew out to orbit their hold-back points in the howling darkness above the Arctic Ocean. They flew armed and ready for the deadly one-way dash to the enemy capitals: to London, Paris, Cairo, Beijing, Bombay, and the heart of the enemy empire itself, Royal St. Petersburg. Across the flat prairies of Lakotaland, flight crews descended into their silos and pumped liquid fuel aboard their bulbous first-generation ICBMs. In the oceans, submarine captains received their low-frequency alert codes and brought their nuclear-powered vessels to periscope depth while the missile teams readied their birds. But it was an exercise in impotence: none of the bombers or ICBMs or SLBMs carried the world-walkers who were a necessity if they were to engage the real threat.
By dawn of the day after this deathwatch, it became clear that the sum of all fears had not come to pass. The high-altitude drone was not the harbinger of Armageddon. Across the New American Commonwealth’s three continents and scattered territories, the unsleeping Air Defense forces saw nothing else unusual. After twelve hours of intense concentration—for, as Dr. Johnson had so memorably observed, nothing concentrates the mind like the knowledge that one is to be hanged—the Commonwealth War Command began to draw down their forces unit by unit, backing slowly away from the brink of a nuclear war with the only adversary they knew how to fight.
All except for JUGGERNAUT, of course. But the JUGGERNAUT superweapon was behind schedule and over budget. It might never be ready. And even if it was viable, it was anyone’s guess whether it would work. After all, the Commonwealth war planners knew that bombers and ICBMs and ballistic missile submarines worked: they’d supped at the fount of dark wisdom supplied by the Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence. They’d studied the Cuban Missile Crisis, the emergency at the end of the Yom Kippur War, and the ghastly intersection of Operation RYaN and Able Archer 83 that had brought the Soviet Union and the United States to the edge of nuclear annihilation in the mid-1980s. They’d majored in cold war studies: Hiroshima and Nagasaki and New Delhi and Islamabad were on the syllabus of the staff college at Rochester. But nobody in any time line they knew of had ever built anything quite like JUGGERNAUT, much less developed doctrine for using it …
NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, JUNE 2020
“How long has he got?” Miriam asked bluntly.
Dr. Porter, the oncology consultant, looked tired. He’d probably answered the question sixteen times before breakfast already. “It’s anyone’s guess,” he said unhelpfully. “The Lord will know his own.”
Miriam glanced sidelong at her husband. Erasmus appeared to be paying more attention to the writing pad on his lap than to her interrogation of the doctor. It was an old habit of his. “I know cachexia when I see it,” she said. “I also know acute spinal degeneration secondary to metastatic tumors, and peripheral neuropathy—”
Dr. Porter’s eyes widened. “I see ma’am is up to date on the new foreign literature,” he said.