Smith shook his head. “We don’t know. That’s why you’re going walkabout. I suggest you study what people are wearing, how they talk, what they do. Wardrobe has run up an outfit based on what you video’d at the railhead. It should pass at a distance. If begging is legal, you could try and get us some cash to copy. Go window-shopping, see what things cost. Building a retail price index will tell us a lot about their economy, which in turn tells us a lot about the constraints imposed on their military by the funding envelope. If you get a chance to talk to people, take it—within reason, we don’t want you running risks. Finally, back in 2003 we got a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel. The Attorney General approves the legal theory that people in other time lines are not subject to the protections and laws of the USA, even if they’re in the equivalent geographical territory. We’re not giving you a gun because if you find yourself in a situation where you might need to defend yourself you should jaunt immediately. But anything you do over there falls outside the scope of our laws over here, if you follow my drift: you have total immunity.”
“Got it. Tomorrow morning, quarter before dawn—that’s about six fifteen, isn’t it? Walk around for a few hours. Not less than two, unless I’m in danger, not more than a day or you start getting edgy. See the sights, play penniless tourist. Anything else?”
“Yes.” Smith nodded. “You’re going to spend the rest of today in a wardrobe fitting, then with props—they’ll orient you on the inertial map system. In particular we want you, if you get a chance, to log waypoints over there for a couple of different types of sites—abandoned houses or retail establishments in particular. Government offices, too. Then you’re sleeping here tonight, I’m afraid. Four-thirty wake-up call for makeup.” He rose. “Good luck and Godspeed.”
Mission Abort
IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
The Colonel, his staff in the Unit, their seniors in the Office of Special Programs, and everyone in the DHS who was aware of the JAUNT BLUE program and the BLACK RAIN time line assumed that Rita’s aborted mission had been completed largely without consequence.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
Rita had been clearly seen by station mate Vance Schofield, age fifty-six. He was a forty-year veteran of the Irontown Regional Permanent Way and its successor, the Commonwealth Eastern Regional Rails, or the CERR. A sober-sided widower and abstainer from spirits, he had challenged Rita to display her ticket of travel: at which point she had vanished into thin air.
Aghast and worried that his eyes were failing him, Schofield had summoned his platform attendant, one Barnett Garrison, an Observer Corps veteran—who had also noticed Rita loitering near the end of the platform, but assumed she was merely a night-shift worker taken short and turned a discreet eye. Together they searched the platform and adjacent tracks. Returning with Schofield to the platform office, Garrison noticed an Unidentified Object attached to one of the windowpanes he had cleaned the evening before. And that’s when Schofield recalled the electronic memoranda about Persons Vanishing in Broad Daylight, Unidentified Objects, and If You See Something, Say Something.
Ten minutes later Schofield laboriously pushed the SEND button on the teletype terminal that linked his office, via telephone line, to the powerful new time-sharing mainframe in Port Richmond (which the CERR had installed to coordinate their railroad network’s back-office business just five years ago). Sixteen minutes later—the Commonwealth intercomputer network was chronically congested, the modems almost permanently engaged as messaging traffic grew by leaps and bounds—his message reached the in-box of one Inspector Alice Morgan of the Commonwealth Transport Police.
Inspector Morgan was in a morning briefing, so did not receive his e-mail at once. But half an hour after her return to a deskful of paperwork, she began to read—and the shit hit the fan. The Commonwealth Transport Police was responsible for securing a rapidly developing infrastructure network that had gone from steam locomotives and biplanes to passenger jets and high-speed rail in just seventeen years. They had been re-formed and trained along modern lines in the wake of the Revolution, as one of the key security services of the Commonwealth Deep State. They were fully briefed on world-walking and its implications. And Alice Morgan had not risen to the rank of Police inspector (in a society that was, in many ways, still deeply conservative and unaccustomed to such newfangled ideas as women working and voting) without being something of an overachiever.
News usually propagates slowly, if at all, through any bureaucracy not built on advanced information technology. Of necessity, the faster channels of communication are scarce and must be reserved for important bulletins. The Commonwealth’s Deep State planners were aware of this. They were also aware of their most likely adversary’s infowar doctrine (even though it relied on technologies that seemed like the most bizarre overextrapolation of current trends) and the vital need to get inside their decision loop. Inspector Morgan’s subsequent on-site report, filed from Schofield’s own railway network terminal using her priority key, went straight over the wire to the National Security Network, carbon-copied to the Force Commander and to the Director of the Department of Para-historical Research, flagged as a FLASH alert.
At three o’clock that afternoon, Miriam Burgeson took her seat at the head of a boardroom table to chair the resulting emergency briefing.
“Background first. What have we found, Commander?” she asked.
“Lots.” Commander Jackson looked extremely unhappy—as he should have, under the circumstances. “I’ve had men combing the Irongate South satellite switchyard since ten o’clock this morning. So far they’ve identified four suspicious objects, believed to be miniature televisor cameras with attached storage devices: so-called webcams. The first was spotted by accident by the platform attendant who cleaned the office window it was adhering to the previous day. He retrieved it and after Forensics finished with it—taking fingerprints and surface samples for DNA matching—it was handed over to a DPR courier. The other three devices have been left in situ by order of the incident controller until we know what you want us to do with them. They are attached to the left upper door windowpane on Signal Box Two, the side of one of the support pillars on the platform awning, and above the northern side door of the supervisor’s office on Platform Three.
“The switchyard is currently closed while my officers conduct a fingertip search of the entire yard, including the track beds. An hour ago, they identified another suspicious object: a device concealed in a lump of timber that had been placed on a walkway between tracks eight and nine. It’s a small sealed weatherproof plastic container, and it radiates magnetoelectric vibrations.” Jackson’s terminology was archaic, a product of an education that predated the arrival of the Clan exiles and the deluge of new science and technology they’d catalyzed.