Milt Mashford had never become used to the fact that the rugged appeal he’d enjoyed in his younger days had degenerated into a decidedly unappealing lecherousness in his sixties. So when he saw the attractive girl in khakis through the dirty windscreen of his ten-year-old F-150, he assumed he would be able to romance the girl into getting into his truck with him.

Due to Lana’s time constraints, and the amount she still had to accomplish, it turned out he was right.

“Hello there, sailor-girl. Can I offer a ride to a member of our proud armed forces?” he said out of his window as he pulled up alongside her.

Lana did not hesitate; at the very least he could take her back to the train station in far less time than it would take her to get there on foot.

“Yes, that would be nice.” she said, her face breaking into a radiant smile that stood in stark contrast to the blackness of her eyes.

* * *

An hour later, Milt had somehow found himself driving the attractive sailor all the way to what she said was her home some forty miles away on the outskirts of Annapolis. As they had pulled up she had leant over and given him a kiss on his cheek, thanking him for being such a patriot.

He had wanted to place his hand on her leg as they had driven, his lascivious instincts telling him he deserved a little grope for driving her so far. But something in her eyes had told him that it would be a mistake he would sorely regret. In the end he had watched her walk away without even looking back at him, and for want of a better option he had driven off, trying to work out if he had just been played, or even worse, had actually just done something nice for someone other than himself.

As the eye above notified Lana that he had turned the corner she also turned, walking down a side road. While she had been locked away on base for the first part of her training, the orbiting AI had used the peripheral links it could obtain by hacking the wireless airwaves and acquired her a house. It had also set up bank accounts for those of its operatives that were based in developed societies, and established several dummy corporations that it could siphon money to and from as needed. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it had started the long and complex task of establishing a complete and verifiable background for each of the Agents. Lana was now going to be the first to establish a full and permanent land connection for the orbiting platforms, at which point their hacking and data manipulation would be able to start in earnest.