Four hours later, Lana stepped off a regional train at the small, rural town of Parrsville. In a brief stop not dissimilar to the one Pei Leong-Lam had made on his approach to Weifang, Lana had also been forced to bury her conspicuous black bag as well. After a brief visit to a sporting supply store in the town center to buy a duffle bag, she began walking out of the town until she came to a spot along the road and stopped. She was exactly equidistant from the last house of the housing development on the outskirts of town and the first of the slightly dilapidated but still busy farmhouses that were the bread and butter of this area.

As she waited for the go-ahead from the ever-watchful eye above, she contacted her subspace relay waiting underground nearby, reinitiating the real-time connection with the orbiting platform. This allowed her to send instead of just receive information for the first time in ten weeks. While she uploaded her report on the Officer Training School where she had been sequestered for the last two and half months, the satellite confirmed that there were no cars in either direction for some distance and instructed the waiting black bag to extricate itself from its hiding place.

Lana watched as the object started to rise out of the loose soil at the side of the wheat field, its sides undulating, working it up out of the soil like a giant worm. Over the past two months it had been driven over twice by a tractor, and the farmer’s dog had urinated on the soil over its head on several occasions as it sniffed at the alien presence below. But despite this, it had remained unharmed and, luckily for the farmer and his dog, it had also remained undiscovered. In a vineyard in France, a vintner had discovered a mysterious black bag there when he had begun to dig up an infected vine from one of his rows of Sauvignon Blanc. His end had been quick and gory, and the bag had simply shuffled itself to the side, reburying itself. It had remained there, unseen, while first the vintner’s family, then the police had attempted in vain to discover the cause of the unfortunate man’s death.

But Lana’s relay had not been uncovered by fate, farmer, or mutt, and she now reached down and picked the large object up bodily with her amplified strength. She held it suspended as it vibrated momentarily at sonic speeds, shaking free the remaining dirt and muck from its sides, then pulled her newly purchased duffle bag over it, zipped it shut, and slung it over her shoulder, careful all the while not to place all the heavy black bag’s weight on the wholly inadequate straps of the duffle that now held it.

* * *