“I’m sure they do,” Adrian agreed affably. “Propaganda and industrial espionage—defending the indefensible, eh?” He beamed, then continued: “I’ll see you’re added to the list right away. Can’t think why you weren’t on it to begin with, honestly.” He sat down. “Will you stay for a while? I’m not busy, and it’s been too long since we’ve had a chance to chew the cud.”
More likely he meant, It’s been too long since I had a chance to pick your brains. Adrian was often in the office for eighteen hours a day, burning the midnight electricity. He had a mind like a mantrap, a superb memory, a grasp of the tiniest minutiae, and a pleasant demeanor. Miriam would have been entranced by him, and even considered him a possible suitable successor for the First Man, if she hadn’t also suspected him of being as ideologically flexible as a rubber band. A courtier’s courtier, rather than a man of integrity. “We really ought to get together some time.” Miriam smiled at him. “Unfortunately I’ve got to chair a meeting of the Joint Intelligence Committee this afternoon, and Erasmus has—what do you have, dear?”
“Contingency planning.” Erasmus gave Holmes a fey smile. “Black crepe, martial music, state funeral with gun carriage and cathedral, and then what, eh? It’s coming, Ade. Someone has to manage how we are seen in our hour of grief, an’ all that.”
Don’t rub it in too hard, you moron! Miriam wished, not for the first time, that marital vows conferred spousal telepathy: at times like this it would have been more than handy. “What he means to say is that, strictly speaking, the dismal contingency facing us is going to dominate the news cycle for weeks, and he’s already in the throes of planning for it.”
“Well, don’t let me keep you.” Adrian grinned at her, or bared his teeth—it was much the same expression. “But we really must talk soon, you know. Before we’re overtaken by events.”
“You must come round for dinner sometime next week,” Miriam offered. “Have your people talk to my people: I’m sure we can sort out a quiet tête-à-tête, just the three of us.”
“Absolutely,” he said, his tone pleasant. “I’ll see when they can fit you in. My diary’s filling up rather fast, I’m afraid. Ciao!”
It was a dismissal. Not so long ago, a dismissal of that kind, in that tone, would have been the prerogative of the First Man and none other—you simply did not dismiss two People’s Commissioners of cabinet rank. But thanks to a freakish piece of medical bad luck, time was running out for the First Man. And it was anybody’s guess who would pick up the reins when the driver left the carriage for the last time.
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO; IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
The lights along the railway platform switched on without warning. There were dozens, maybe even hundreds of them. Hot, pinkish-white tungsten filaments sheathed in frosted white glass.
Rita jumped down from the bench she’d been standing on and ran, shielding her glare-bruised eyes. Behind the station office, the side facing the brick wall was unlit, the shadows around it thick and deep. It’s just this platform, she realized as she flattened her back against the wall. She checked the time in her head-up display: three forty-nine. The rest of the switchyard was in darkness, but now she heard a rattle and a click, footsteps walking along the front of the building she’d taken shelter behind. Scheisse. The tracks. The tracks between her and the survey point for her jaunt home gleamed in reflected light. The switchyard floodlights were out, but up the line she saw signal lamps switch from red to blue. Night train coming.
She licked her suddenly dry lips and took stock. I’m above ground level. The platform was about five feet above the track beds. She whispered: “Maps, inertial, display current-equivalent location.” The head-up display delivered. She was about a third of a mile away from the Colonel’s big tent revival camp. If she jaunted home, she’d come out across a highway, maybe in someone else’s parking lot, maybe inside a shuttered Target. A sickening sense of relief turned her knees to jelly and threatened her with blackout. She’d risk a sprained ankle, but so what. The telemetry box could look after itself, in a pinch. One-shot ARMBAND units cost only a few tens of thousands of dollars these days, according to Patrick. She took a deep breath. So let’s stay and see what’s going on …
More footsteps, then male voices, gruff and muffled by distance and corners. They were just at the edge of hearing, their accents strange. “Aye Bill, that wert right clever.” (Inaudible reply.) “Well youse can jist get thyself across to tha’ signals and set the track block to am-pass. Oh, an’ light up the yard. They’re due in ten minutes.”
A rattle of keys in a lock: more footsteps, then a heavy thud and a crunching of boots on ballast as someone—Bill, at a guess—jumped down onto the tracks and headed away. The light changed, brightening slightly: possibly because Bill’s interlocutor had entered the station office and turned on more lamps. “Video feed, last node,” Rita whispered.
A grainy video window sprang to life in her head-up display: the interior of the station office. A middle-aged, overweight man with bushy sideboards and comic-opera headgear—Is that a tricorn hat?—flopped down behind the computer terminal, punching laboriously at the keys with meaty index fingers. His coat or cloak or other outer garment (it was hard to tell: ruffles and frogging obscured part of it) hung over a hook on the back of the open door. Without looking, he reached sideways and picked up an antique telephone handset that trailed a pigtail coil of wire. “Station mate’s office,” he said (his voice tinny but completely audible through the glass and the webcam pickup), “Eugene hailing.” (A pause.) “Yes, you should have a good signal in another minute.” He hung up.
Rita felt, rather than heard, a faint rumble, followed by a hiss and shimmer of tracks rubbing against their tie-downs. She looked sideways and saw the lights of a train, then heard a deep rumble and the crack of a spark as it approached, pantograph flaring momentarily against the overhead power cables. It was, she saw, a short passenger train. Like a commuter train, it had multiple doors spaced along each of its five carriages; but like a European high-speed express, it was streamlined and bullet-nosed. The windows were lit, showing an indistinct mass of people in dark coats sitting and standing within. Brakes sighed as it rolled alongside the platform and drifted to a standstill; then the doors opened with a hiss to disgorge a torrent of bodies onto the front of the platform.