Of Stations Infernal

by Kin S. Law

  “You should get on,” Arturo said. He got up, without any of his usual flair. “We’ve lost time as it is.”

  “What about you?” Hargreaves said. “Our velocipede is crushed under that steel beam.”

  “Take the Lamia,” Arturo said, pointing to the engine Hargreaves had fallen into. “I saw the driver get in with some others in a van and ride away. He’ll think it was crushed in the fall.”

  “Why that’s…” Hargreaves stopped short. She had committed enough crimes already, one more would not hurt.

  “Go. I can catch up. Once this one’s driver fails to report in they will flee with all speed. Perhaps I can find something of use here, but unless you get going we will lose the Cook box once and for all.”

  Hargreaves hesitated, not sure what to do.

  “GO!” barked Arturo.

  The inspector turned on her heel and loped towards the open-roofed engine, hopping neatly over the door and into the driver’s seat. She whirled once, her golden mane fluttering, before pulling out of the lot, over a grass divider, and down the road.

  “Godspeed, Inspector,” Arturo said, watching her go. He winced, gripping his leg where a shiny red burn gleamed. If he had let Hargreaves see, she would have insisted on taking him to a hospital, and lost valuable time. Besides, there was something else that needed doing here.

  Arturo hobbled along, avoiding the scalding mud as best he could. Ducking under a crumpled automata leg, he briefly inspected the spider. Upon finding the cockpit hatch, Arturo pried it open with a dislodged piece of the water tower’s railing. Inside he found the driver’s badly scalded body still strapped into its chair. As he hastily unstrapped the corpse and shoved it over the edge, a trickle of blood spilled from its mouth. Blithely wiping at the stain with a handkerchief, Arturo sat at the machine’s controls. They glittered, invitingly, all shining toggles and glass-fronted chrome. Some of the labels had been scorched off. Excellent. A mystery!

  “Now then…reveal your secrets to Adler,” he muttered, tucking in.

  Hargreaves’ hair rippled in an unruly sail behind her, but she paid it no mind. She shifted more fuel into the engine’s furnace. Surely the pressure could not rise much further into the red before some vital component blew, but she kept the flames roaring inside the Lamia’s belly. Six long tubes of glass showed the pressure inside each of the pistons, a roiling blue hell trapped in bottles.

  The Americans had built into this piece of machinery the heart of the west. Inside the long, gold-rimmed bonnet beat an unyielding rhythm that pushed her along like winged Hermes himself. The Lamia roadster was eggshell white, upholstered in red, with that classic wide, open front grille like the mouth of a great white shark. Sticking out from either side of the bonnet were oiled, naked steering mechanisms, holding out the front wheels like striking paws. She found the other drivers quite willing to acquiesce, seeing that maw opening up in their mirrors, giving her the right of way more often than not.

  She shifted more fuel, as the previous rod burned through, showing in a weighted gauge on the panel before her. The mechanism rotated another rod onto the furnace pile, in a motion that dumped the spent ashes into a pan at the bottom of the engine so her passing threw up a comet’s tail of sparks on the road. The colloquial was coal, or even peat, but these rods were far and removed from such primitive fuels.

  Hargreaves steered round a slow four-trailer lorry, a long string of square boxes, and the driver pulled on the horn. The camaraderie was pleasant, until she saw the flashing lights in her mirror. A long black police cruiser tailed her, using its arc signals to flag her toward the side of the road.

  “Sorry, constable. Normally I’m the most law-abiding person,” Hargreaves mumbled. She dipped the nose of the Lamia toward the shoulder, as if to pull over, then abruptly wrenched it to the left, diving between a cabriolet and sedan that closed the gap behind her. She felt the movement keenly, an unpleasant, unfamiliar gesture—after all, she hadn’t driven on the right side of the road for long.

  Trapped, the police engine gave a frustrated wail of anger. Hargreaves opened the throttle further, weaving the Lamia through loose traffic at as close as she could figure over a hundred miles an hour. The speedometer had broken in the fuel depot. So had the windshield, and the gale tore at her scarf. If her goggles weren’t on she would be tearing up, blind.

  “There. Now I’ve gone and done it,” Hargreaves said. “I wonder what the bounty for my head will be?” Actually, she found she cared more about whether they would get her leonine profile right for the wanted posters.

  Station 9

  Ronin Memory

  Some hours later, Hargreaves’ determination paid off. As she came to a long, languid dip in the road, the land seemed to open before her, and in the distance she saw the chugging, smoking bulk of the rail fort, churning along at a frightening speed. It was still a ways off, and she suspected it would have left her behind long ago if the terrain weren’t as wild and untamed. America herself was helping Hargreaves.

  The meeting was a chance occurrence. Had she gone any slower, or much faster, she might have missed the ship entirely. Because of the dip in the road she could see far ahead of her, where a set of four train-roads crossed beneath the paved asphaltum under the Lamia’s tires. Likely as not, she could intercept the rail fort there!

  There was little time to ponder the machinations hanging overhead. Even at the Lamia’s tremendous speed, and the heavy load of the rail fort the dastards would soon overtake her and be lost. The road bent visibly before her, crossing the river valley and continuing on past. She would have to think of some means to halt the train before they reached the crossing.

  “Come on, Vanessa! What have you? Your bollocks are so big you have to wear them on your front, now think! Be daring!”

  “Shut up, Clemens!” Hargreaves shouted, but of course she was alone.

  The fact she was hearing voices spoke to her growing suspicions about her sanity. or maybe her doubts had finally reached a head and taken audible form. Vanessa had been letting herself grow reckless, getting hurt with the Orb Weaver, letting her appetites have their day with Funny Goat. Then there was the murder in Appleton…she thought of it as murder, even though she had struck in self-defense. The smell of that slaughterhouse still haunted her at night. But most of all, she had been pushing back her increasing dissatisfaction with her mission and Her Majesty. She felt it like cloud at the back of her mind. Why it chose the pirate captain to impersonate was disconcerting.

  The crossing was approaching fast, and Hargreaves skid the Lamia to a halt on the side of the highway, on top of the spot where the rails met the road. Small stones jumped at her feet as she hopped off the roadster. She could see the rail fort approaching now—her first real look at a wall of churning metal that spanned two train roads. For a moment Hargreaves just gaped. The rail fort’s wheels caressed the tracks in a death grip, supporting a wide toothy cow-catcher between engines. In the middle, a platform held what looked to be a ship’s deck, with raised castles and rounded cannons perched atop stocky, bulldog-like haunches. Most terrifyingly, the wet skull of a recently slain longhorn buck had been roped to the front of the left engine. As Hargreaves stared, the rail fort passed under the highway and shook the world.

  All she had was a peashooter and some good old-fashioned British pluck.

  The great double engine of the rail fort passed below, followed by long trains of cargo cars and linked platform cars that held covered loads. The train passed away into the distance on both sides of the road. Suddenly she found herself without doubt or compromise. She jumped back into her roadster and turned the steering wheel hard, sending The Lamia into a slide. She backed up, almost all the way to the edge of the other side of the road even as other drivers honked and cursed all around her. Other vehicles slid to a halt but Hargreaves ignored them. She opened up the engine completely, shifting rod after rod into the furnace, throttling the bellows to burn the fuel at a furious pace until the tires ground thems
elves into vapor, slipping and sliding in place. Then she let go of the brakes.

  Something exploded behind her. The pipes at the rear of the Lamia belched a flaming cloud sparkling with metal shavings. Hargreaves’ heart shot into her throat. The piston gauges began to burst, one by one, showering her coat with hot spray and glass shards. The tree line rushed at her. There was a smell of crisp damp, mineral and green, the smell of river and mulch churned up in a rooster tail behind her. Then the curb hit, off the road, and off any sort of guidance. That felt familiar.

  Hargreaves felt exhilarated, if a little stupid. She felt at home in this wild land. She continued to feel it even when the bit of curbing ended, and the Lamia suddenly found her wheels churning the air, rushing forward with a tremendous momentum. The river of train cars surged below her; she had come down on the right side of the rail-fort, over one of the trains of cars and not the intermittent gaps between rails. She heard the boiler rattling dry, moments away from bursting.

  Oh god. She had a thought. What if the train ended just as she landed?

  But she had done the thing properly, and the Lamia came crashing down on a sturdy deck of some kind. She leaped clear of the Lamia even as it skid across the deck, running out of landing strip fast. She rolled, and when she came to a rest saw the Lamia foundering over the edge of the rail fort’s prodigious deck. Then there came a tremendous crunching and the flatulent sound of an exploding boiler as the rail fort’s wheels chewed her little roadster to bits.

  “Hello Ghost Train. So, you are corporeal after all,” she said, knocking on the varnished deck of the beastly great train.

  She stood, brushing her clothes off, and found herself standing upon a wide landing platform that had been erected between two cargo cars. There was an exposed loading berth and a scavenger’s dirigible lashed down to one side of the platform. It took up the space of an entire train car. Hargreaves recalled the Montmarte Express, and noted the dirigible’s powerful salvage claw. On the other side, there were a number of the daddy-long-legs automata, docked inside the frame of a shipping cradle that looked like it had been meant to transport roadsters like her poor Lamia.

  A linkage platform between cars led to the rest of the rail fort. Hargreaves headed to it. She was out in the open, a sitting duck on the huge platform. In the short time she crossed the deck, about ten or so small trees that had sprung up between tracks were flattened by the rail fort’s passing. How the blazes did this monstrosity cross the wilds of America without being discovered? Hargreaves thought perhaps some money had crossed palms, or those horrible cannons at the rail fort’s front were even more frightening than she thought.

  When the first man appeared on the linkage, she clipped him with a .22 bullet to the shoulder. Her gun shoulder ached abominably from the spider attack, but she shot southpaw from the hip, a fast-draw trick she had seen one of the circus carnies do and practiced in her evenings. Now she could hit a whiskey bottle from a hundred yards. The man, much closer than a hundred yards, fell screaming to his death, mangled under the iron wheels.

  Her hands trembled, her heart pound in her chest, and her fingers felt numb. She expected the other crew members to come investigate the commotion, but none were forthcoming. She continued to try to convince herself she wasn’t a cold-blooded killer.

  Inside, she found the jarring specter of the Cook box sitting in the middle of the car. Some part of her wanted to open the cargo door nearby and push it right over the edge to be destroyed with whatever was inside. But was the horrid thing still inside the box? Hargreaves threw open the lid, anticipating what she would find even as her hands stung from the wind-scored coldness of the metal. The lids banged open, clanging against the claws holding it in place.

  She hadn’t been sure what she had seen inside back at the train wreck, but thankfully, the box was empty. Now the box was just a box, huge and heavy and filling the boxcar. Hargreaves sighed, her chest heaving with something like relief.

  Reloading her pistol, Hargreaves strode back outside toward the spider automata. With a shock, she discovered the train was now composed of one single line of cars, chugging through some hilly country. The platforms bridging the two parallel trains had been retracted, and at a casual glance Hargreaves would say the landing berth had been folded underneath the cradle car, just over the wheels. In the distance, some of the boxcars looked like they had been shuffled over on a see-saw like arrangement, tipped to one side of the train to make room for the bridged castles, cannons, and other large, centrally mounted components. The rail fort must have used a switch-over to run the left half of itself behind the right half, hardly slowing as it did. It made sense- few tracks ran parallel to each other, even in wide-open America. Whatever machinery noise had occurred had gone unnoticed by Hargreaves, who had been about the business of killing.

  Within a short while she found what she was looking for: a series of long levers at one end of the cradle. She stepped up to them, squinting against the wind. With a feeling of deep satisfaction she pulled each of the levers until they clicked. At once, the spider automata shifted, groaning on their bearings, before sliding smoothly off their cradles. One after another they lowered gently to the ground and promptly tumbled off into the countryside. They smashed to bits on the quickly moving rocks.

  “No running now,” she thought, but whether it was the thieves’ escape or her own, she could not say. She tied her skirts into a knot at her back and squared her shoulders. Gripping her .22 Tranter and 9mm Browning, she took a deep breath and kicked down the door. She cleared the corners. Her mind sharpened to the task at hand.

  The train’s steam lines were not, in fact, strung with the bones of the damned. She stood on a landing between two decks of a double decker car. She saw down the upper and lower hallways. Both looked deserted.

  Hargreaves passed through the lower level—what appeared to be a barracks or sleeping car—doubling back to clear the upper level. Her drill officer would have been proud of the way she efficiently cleared each room. She found nothing save a wide gun belt and pouch stuffed with 9mm ammunition, which she appropriated. The belt was too cumbersome to wear over her shoulder, so she looped it twice over her hips, feeling quite the bandito. Then she stuffed the Browning into the holster, so she could crank open the door on the other side one-handed. The wind buffeted her again between cars, but there was some overlapping guards over the passage here, shielding her somewhat, and found a second barracks car, also deserted.

  After that came a common area car, sparse, and a few storage cars after that, but no one else appeared to threaten her. Some held crates of Ubique Canned Beef, others bars of soap, even more soybeans, lentils, and various sundry. She seemed to be passing through the more mundane areas of the rail fort. Hargreaves guessed the sensitive areas of the fort were farther forward, where the other half of the train had joined in a long serpent.

  Only when she threaded through a vast fuel car and ascended a short stair up into an engine room did she discover the first of the crew; a hearty, bald Red Indian covered head to toe in mercenary tattoos. The engine was one of the two great steaming behemoths at the head of the rail fort, now in the middle of the train. When the Indian spotted Hargreaves he lunged at her with a wrench as tall as she was. Her Tranter barked fearsomely, but only rang a staccato beat with ricochet. The tiny bullets were meant to be fast and accurate, not to punch through railroad steel.

  Spotting the handle of a knife, she made a grab for it and hamstrung the man as she rolled under his wrench. A gout of blood spilled across the shaking deck. The man crumpled, and Hargreaves knocked him out with a heel stomp. When she stepped around him, she found a few other engineers; a mix of freemen and Orientals with long braids. They looked at her but did nothing to stop her, looking curiously at the Indian before returning to work.

  “Daaaamnn,” said one of the freemen. Clearly they had no love for their boss.

  “Good knife,” she remarked just to be sure of cowing them, wiping it on a napkin. The I
ndian had been eating an apple and some jerky with it. The handle was wrapped bone, quite sturdy.

  The next guard was farther along in the next car. Hargreaves walked out the front of the engine, through a notch in one half of the fearsome cowcatcher. The next car looked like the caboose for the other half of the train, appointed as a basic mess car. Like the rest of the fort, it bulged with riveted armor and featured multiple gun ports, with one rear-facing rotary cannon.

  Hargreaves suddenly had to duck behind a bulkhead to avoid a sideways rain of motor gun bullets. About time, too, she thought in passing. Besides another man, there was a woman with a short, violently azure haircut tucked inside a bandana. Her shots gouged fist-sized holes in the wood paneling; a scatter-gun, loaded with lead shot. Thankfully neither were very bright. Hargreaves simply counted the shots until the motor gun rattled empty, and the scatter-gun fired twice. During the brief pause, she darted out of her spot and shot the first man through his gun arm, inside the elbow, with two tightly spaced 9mm bullets. It reduced the limb to bloody rags inside the sleeve. Bollocks. The owner of her new gunbelt had been cutting crosses in the bullets. She hadn’t wanted to do that. But her guilt had to wait. A lolling arc sheathed her new knife into the woman guard’s abdomen as she raised her scatter gun to fire. Chunks of the deck blew away as it howled harmlessly into the floor.

  “Mercenaries?” Hargreaves wondered, as she watched the first man fade dead away, clutching the ragged ruin of his arm. As she turned, the woman reared up with a vicious stiletto. The blade connected with her upper arm, causing searing pain. Hargreaves flailed open-handed at the bone handle still stuck in the woman’s stomach, extracting a scream of pain as it ripped sideways out of the wound. Hargreaves closed her hand upon it, but the azure woman slumped motionless in a puddle of blood.