DR. SCRANTON: So it’s fast?
COL. SMITH: They have a fully electrified wide-gauge railway network and use high-speed commuter trains to move people to and from industrial plants. Those low-altitude records we got from the Gnats? Lots of twelve-story buildings surrounded by foliage. The lack of suburban sprawl and highways is all consistent with a planned social housing infrastructure, built around apartment blocks and lots and lots of urban light rail.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: You mean they, they live in apartments and commute by streetcar and train?
DR. SCRANTON: Yes. This tells us something about their financial system and economy, by the way. They’re a rent-not-buy country, so their consumer economy probably isn’t debt-backed and underwritten by an asset bubble. I mean, we might be looking at condominiums, but then we’d expect to see some McMansions as well, and suburban sprawl around highways. And we’re just not seeing that. So either they’re old-school Commies who live in state-run apartments, or they’re like Germany or Japan, hardworking savers who don’t mortgage up and whose real estate depreciates after it’s built. Possibly they’ve got state land ownership.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: That sounds pretty un-American.
COL. SMITH: Yes. And then there was the flatbed Rita spotted. I brought a print for you.
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Jesus. That’s a tank … Jesus.
COL. SMITH: A shift change at 0400 hours suggests to me that they’re working round the clock, twenty-four/seven. The webcams got us an estimated head count of four hundred and eighty workers, plus or minus twenty. Now, they might have multiple staggered shifts, but even if they’re swapping out five hundred workers every hour, that maxes out at four to six thousand in whatever factory they’re at. And that train, well, our best estimate is that it was carrying about sixty main battle tanks. M1 Abrams class or similar, judging by what was visible of their hull box size, suspension layout, and turret design. Enough to equip the core of a mechanized infantry brigade.
DR. SCRANTON: Are they highly automated?
COL. SMITH: We might be wrong. The munitions train might have been a coincidence—but rolling out of the vicinity of Bethlehem? Appalachian coal and iron country? If you’re going to start building heavy metal in North America, that’s one of the places you’d begin. If they’re producing tanks there and the factory only employs a few thousand people, then that implies highly efficient manufacturing. I mean, there might be other satellite stations serving the other side of a big complex, or maybe they run a reduced maintenance shift at night and those were the cleaners and janitors going home, but … I’m calling this a clear indicator of 1960s technology or later, just not our 1960s. We might be wrong about the housing and finance stuff, by the way. It might just be a local dorms-for-factory-workers kind of thing. We won’t know until we get boots on the ground and noses in library books. But it looks like kind of a Soviet setup to me. Paranoid and heavily armed with nuclear weapons.
DR. SCRANTON: Okay, Colonel. Now here’s a leading question: if this was your show, where would you want to take it? Feel free to brainstorm, I’m open to ideas …
COL. SMITH: Well, I don’t think we’re going to learn much more that’s useful by having Rita stumble around a switchyard at night. For one thing it’s dangerous, and for another, we got what we came for. What we need now is cultural intelligence—all the little details our future agents will need to operate in place. We also need large scale SIGINT and ELINT snooping programs, but that’s a job for the National Reconnaissance Office. I imagine they’ve got ARMBAND-equipped spysats with capsule return systems like the old Keyhole series, or some equivalent. But we probably want to hold off on lobbing heavy metal into orbit until we know if these people have satellites of their own—we don’t want to set off World War Three by accident. It’s going to have to happen sooner or later if we plan to engage with them, but not yet. In the meantime, I’d strongly recommend pushing Phase Two: maybe into Philly proper. The social housing thing raises an added risk factor—fewer safe houses where agents won’t be under scrutiny from the neighbors—but we’ve got enough video that our wardrobe department say they can knock off a costume that will stand up at a distance. And thanks to the webcams we should have enough dialogue for Linguistics to start working up a training kit in a week or so. And we can iterate. It gets riskier from here on in, but Rita’s resourceful. As long as we give her as much support as she wants and as much elbow room as she needs, she’ll do fine.
DR. SCRANTON: Right. So tell me how we’re going to do it.
END TRANSCRIPT
Shell Game
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020
Rita jaunted back into the real world, as she still thought of it, at seven minutes past four in the morning. By four forty she’d been through a decontamination shower, a medical check, three blood samples, and a humiliatingly random piss test. (Apparently someone was worried she’d spent her hour in the BLACK RAIN time line cranking up on crystal meth: the war on drugs might have ended in an armistice, but government employment regulations took a dim view of using recreational pharmaceuticals on the job.) So when Patrick materialized and shoved a steaming mug of Starbucks into her hand, it came as a blessed relief—until he shook his head. “Save it for the debriefing committees,” he murmured.
“Committees, plural?”
“Yup.”
“Oh hell. Sorry.”
They let her take off her body armor and extract herself from the rat’s nest of biomonitor electrodes before they sat her down and grilled her for eight hours. Her interrogators took shifts in strict rotation: Patrick and the Colonel, first and fastest, then two teams of suits from Maryland, one to perform due diligence and oversight on the Unit’s reportage, and the other to perform due diligence on the due-diligence checkers. Patrick and the Colonel wanted her to walk them through her telemetry feed and provide commentary, giving them insights into why she’d done particular things. Suit Team One wanted to walk her through their checklist instead, and Suit Team Two seemed to want her to walk them through Suit Team One’s checklist, while demonstrating all the flexibility of a gang of incredibly advanced animatronic department store mannequins.