“So. Witness sighting of a person who vanished into thin air—from a normally reliable member of staff—and indirect confirmation in the shape of concealed monitoring devices.” Miriam frowned. She wished she felt sufficiently at ease to relax her politician’s mask and actually vent her true emotions—scream and shout, maybe throw something at the wall—but it would send entirely the wrong message at this point. Deep breathing time. “Ken. Analysis? What do your people say? Anything else?”
Ken McInnes, her deputy director in charge of Operational Analysis, shook his head. “We’re still putting it together. There’s been a marked uptick in UFO sightings in Pennsylvania in general over the past month, described variously as ‘giant hornets’ or ‘tiny airplanes.’ Air Defense Command confirms some anomalous sightings, both from the Observer Corps and radar, but the objects were flying low and slow and nobody managed to get a lock. They scrambled interceptors for two of the sightings, but there was nothing there when the jets arrived. I would speculate—let me caution that this is uncorroborated guesswork—that the adversary might be using very small drones to conduct localized probes. If they pop into our airspace less than a thousand feet up, spend most of their time barely above treetop height, and hang around for less than fifteen minutes, we’ll have the devil’s own job spotting them.
“On the upside: there’s no sign of activity anywhere else. Whatever’s going on, it’s highly local. We haven’t seen any sign of UFOs over the Pacific Northwest or the Andes, for example. They’re focusing on Irongate and Philadelphia, so I think what we may be seeing is airborne activity in support of a ground-based clandestine insertion.”
Worse and worse. Miriam glanced sideways at the woman in the wheelchair. “Any thoughts?”
“Where did they get the world-walker?” Olga looked haggard. She had a bad tendency to insist on working even when she was too ill to do so productively. But as usual she asked the right question. “Do we have a defector, or is this something else?” She gave Miriam a penetrating stare.
“Defectors.” Miriam rolled her pen between index finger and thumb. Fuck. She looked up. “Action this day: immediate roll call of all world-walking personnel, by order of the Commissioner in Charge, MITI. Make it so.” She glanced at Olga again. The head of the Clan’s own internal security force, such as it was, shook her head doubtfully. “What are the chances they unearthed that bastard Griben’s database?” she asked.
“Database?” echoed McInnes.
“Low but not impossible.” Olga raised a frail fist to cover her mouth when she coughed. She was only forty, but looked older than Miriam’s early fifties: life’s unfairness personified. “You’re aware of Griben ven Hjalmar’s position as the Clan’s in-house doctor, back in the day?” McInnes nodded. Ven Hjalmar had thrown in his lot with the wrong side during the confused and turbulent aftermath of the Revolution—not the Royalists, but the quasi-Stalinists. He’d paid with his life. “He ran a fertility clinic in the United States, to help childless couples conceive.”
Heads around the table nodded, uncertainly. The Commonwealth’s demographic profile and medical technology was such that it still had a surplus of orphanages. “He was compiling a database of children conceived via this clinic—using seed harvested from world-walkers. The plan was to pay the resulting women—at adulthood—to act as host mothers. Producing a crop of active world-walkers, a generation down the line.”
Heads were shaking, and a low undercurrent of whispering started. “Silence!” snapped Miriam. “Leave the commentary for later. Let her continue.”
“Your mother assassinated the clinic’s director and stole what she thought was the entire database of latent carriers.” Miriam nodded. Iris had been an unholy terror, even in a wheelchair. “But her grasp of modern technology was sadly deficient.”
“You think she left something?” Miriam momentarily forgot her own instruction.
“Don’t know. Insufficient data.” Olga’s cheek twitched. “The first-generation carriers would be aged between seventeen and twenty-two at this point. But they’d be outer Clan—sorry, carriers. Not world-walkers themselves…”
“But you’re thinking, if there’s some way to activate the ability, the Americans have had more than fifteen years to work on it?”
Miriam looked round the table. No whispering. Just twelve pairs of eyes drilling into her as if her blood contained answers to their every nightmare question. “I don’t know,” she said. She felt like screaming, Do you think I’m clairvoyant or something? But she didn’t: she knew what would happen. Half of them probably did think she was clairvoyant. The Clan refugees, since that tentative start in the freezing-cold prison camp in the winter of 2003–04, had turbocharged the embryonic Commonwealth with imported alien ideas. The Commonwealth had made as much technological progress in seventeen years as time line two had in three decades. But it had unfortunate side-effects. Everyone looked at her as if she were some kind of Albert Einstein / Marie Curie hybrid: they expected her to have all the answers, all the time.
“Let me repeat that: I don’t know. But I think we should bear it in mind as a worst case. The United States knows about us—they’ve been sending drones, and we’ve shot down a few. If they’ve got actual world-walkers, then what we’re seeing is an early attempt at clandestine insertion. Possibly supported by tactical drones. It’s an information-gathering exercise, and our friend the station mate accidentally disrupted it.” She shrugged. “Recommendations?”
Olga spoke up. “Keep looking for UFO sightings. Blanket those areas with watchers. That would be Irongate and Philadelphia, yes? Brief the regular beat police. Also perhaps ask the Commonwealth Guard to put boots on the ground. And move close-range air defense units into position. Hmm. A spy scare in the local newspapers would prime the locals. Remember to brief the cops not to use lethal force. Do they have tasers yet?” Electric stun guns copied from the American products were a new development.
Commander Jackson shook his head. “They’re available but not issued yet. Men don’t like them—the battery packs are heavy and they’re no use against real guns—”
Miriam checked him. “Clandestine world-walkers won’t stick around to get into a gunfight. They’ll just leave. I want them taken alive for questioning, if at all possible. Shooting them may not stop them from world-walking, but if you tase them and get them blindfolded they won’t be able to escape.”
Jackson nodded, unhappily. “Tasers, blindfolds, and you want everyone briefed? It’s going to cause chaos.”
“Not necessarily.” Olga looked thoughtful. “It is a first-contact scenario. Miriam, I believe you have some experience in this regard. Perhaps you could explain to the Commander here how a world-walker goes about making first contact with a new time line? Then he can focus his planning accordingly…”
PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020