“What are you all doing?” asked one of the men standing watch near the station entrance as the buggy approached. Noomi Bloodgood had stayed off the two roads that abutted the station, but now guards were stationed farther out at intersections. She had unknowingly driven into a scout post.
“We’re scouting for execs,” Tully said gruffly, tired of being harassed.
Indri elaborated, using his oratory skill. As before, he was persuasive. But one of the workers said, “When was the last time any of you have seen a Delph here? There was that one, Mintran, but he had to quit because the atmosphere on Twilight’s too dry and thin for Delph. I ain’t seen another one since.”
Before Indri could respond, Noomi gunned the buggy, pushing past the small crowd. As it sped away, Tully threw out a foot that caught the second speaker in the gut. “Wise guy!”
The members of the miniature mob gave chase, but were soon outdistanced. By the time any had located bits of debris to throw at the offworlders, the buggy had taken them out of range. The mob was not yet so well organized that they had radios or the like to communicate with one another.
Noomi took the buggy a couple of blocks out of their way and then pulled off road, taking up a course parallel to the series of train tracks that led east. Its anti-gravity repulsor field was set low, for use on paved streets, so that it would not upset so easily with a low center of gravity. But outside Terminus City, the landscape was filled with rocks of every conceivable size that threatened to damage the underside of the buggy, where the repulsor equipment was located.
After several minor collisions, Tully grumbled, “Take it easy, will you? I’m beginning to think I’d be safer back in Terminus City.”
Noomi Bloodgood chuckled. “This thing won’t go fast enough to kill us, skivver.”
It quickly grew colder and darker as they approached the black frigid zone of Twilight. Without speaking, Indri, in the front seat beside Noomi, pulled on his atmosphere suit after discarding his miner garb. He opened the vent, which would provide him with breathable air; an atmosphere suit normally carried a two hour supply, and there was no reason to use it in these circumstances.
“Good idea,” Tully said from the rear seat, and followed suit.
After another thirty minutes, Noomi brought the buggy to a halt.
“What’s the matter?” the Earthman asked in a worried tone.
“Nothing,” the Tatar girl explained. “I’m starting to get chilly myself.”
“Oh. Good,” Tully said as Noomi drew on her atmosphere suit. “I thought something was wrong with our ride.”
“No,” Noomi answered, putting the buggy back in motion. “You sure do like to worry.”
“You might recall that I slept through the last fourteen hundred years of technological advancements, so I don’t know how everything works like you do.”
A train suddenly whizzed by in the direction of the spaceport.
“Boy, I’d pay good money to be on one of those,” remarked Tully. “We should have tried to flag it down.”
Gesturing with a hand, Indri said, “Automated. That is a cargo train.” Beyond the wide magnetic track lay a smaller one, the one used for the passenger train.
“What do I care? I just want to get back to the Vishnu.”
Chuckling, the Tatar observed, “I didn’t realize you were such a tenderfoot. This is a picnic compared to some of the assignments I had in the Templars.”
“We’re all very happy for you,” retorted Tully. “I had a life before I joined the navy, and it didn’t entail hiking across seventy miles of desert.”
“You’re not hiking,” Indri pointed out calmly.
“You know what I mean.
“If you liked the Templars so much, why’d you leave?” Tully asked Noomi.
“A disagreement with a superior officer,” she returned lightly.
It was the Earthman’s turn to laugh. “I’ve had my share of those with commanding officers. Too many took the term ‘superior officer’ literally. But no terminal problems. I’d have been cut off if I got myself kicked out of the navy.”
“‘Cut off’?” asked the Tatar. “What is that?”
“Never mind,” Tully said quickly. “You were saying …?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Noomi, falling silent.
Indri Mindsinger knew a few of the details regarding the girl’s dismissal from the Templars. She’d been court-martialed for insubordination and kicked out of the Templars. The matter was so severe that the Imperium had sentenced her to life on Purgatory, its most secret prison planet.
There had to be more to it than Noomi had told him, but she had revealed nothing further, and the Delphite priest had not asked. He knew that when she was ready to explain, she would. There were parts of his own life that he did not want known.
The buggy finally passed into darkness, and the terminus was only a faint glow on the horizon behind them now. Another cargo train, going the opposite direction, whizzed by. Gradually, the ride became rougher, and the vehicle ran into more and more rocks.
“I thought you could see in the dark,” Tully complained. The buggies, intended for the twilight zone of the planet, did not possess lights.
“I can!” Noomi retorted. “The terrain is rockier here!”
“The intense cold has preserved the landscape while the weather in the terminus zone has eroded the rocks on the surface, reducing their size over eons,” Indri explained.
“I thought you were a priest,” the Earthman said sourly. “Now you’re a geologist.”
“It is common sense, Tully,” Indri replied calmly. His race did not take offense easily, and the Delphite priest knew the human was irritated at the situation, not him. The Delph were known for their patience.
Then, from the underside of the buggy came a loud thunk, followed by a scraping sound. A moment later, the little vehicle dropped suddenly, hitting the ground with a jarring impact. It skidded a couple of feet before coming to a rest, gouging the sandy soil under it.
For a moment, no one said anything. Finally, Tully spoke. “Wonderful. Just wonderful.”
Getting out of the buggy, Indri Mindsinger said, “I estimate twenty miles to the spaceport.” The Delph species possessed an uncanny sense of direction and distance, though not so much of time.
“That’s an easy seven hours in this terrain,” grumbled Tully.
“Better than the seventy miles we were looking at,” Noomi put in.
“The longer we put this off, the later we will arrive at the spaceport,” The Delphite priest pointed out.
The three began walking. Time passed.
Glancing at the train tracks that were less than a hundred yards away, Noomi announced, “I have an idea. Why don’t we stop a train and board it?”
Indri halted in his tracks and gazed at the series of rails.
“I estimate that the next train going our way will be along shortly,” said the Tatar. “One pulled out of Terminus City not long after we left, and an hour later, one passed us going the other way.”
“I suppose you have an idea how to stop it?” the Delph asked, intrigued by the idea. He did not look forward to such a long hike any more than Tully did, for the suit did not carry enough water to keep him comfortable. The worker in Terminus City who had spoken had been correct: The atmosphere of Twilight was too thin and dry for a Delph.
“I was thinking of the buggy,” explained Noomi. “The trains should be programmed to stop if anything large enough to derail them lies on the track. It’d just smash into one of us. It’s got to be big. Getting a large enough rock is probably going to be too difficult, but the shape of the buggy will let us roll it onto the track. It’s less than three hundred feet.”
“I’m sold,” Tully said excitedly. He started back toward the defunct buggy without waiting for the other two. Soon, they jogged up behind him.
“Hurry up, skivver,” Noomi said as she passed the Earthman. “You don’t want to miss the train, do you?”
/> Suddenly realizing that the train might be that near, Tully hurried after the Tatar.
The trio made good time. They had only walked a mile or so before turning back. Each got on the far side of the buggy, and, putting their hands under it, flipped it over in the direction of the tracks. They continued this process until they got it onto the nearest track, which happened to carry trains going east. It was work and took some time. But the train did not pass as they labored.
Unsure if the size of the buggy was enough to dissuade the train, Indri took cover behind an outcropping. If it struck the small vehicle, the buggy would shatter into a thousand shards. The odds were probably good that he would not be struck by one, but if he was, the impact would probably be fatal.
Noomi and Tully followed. The three waited.
Finally, the train came along. It was moving very fast. But as it approached the buggy in its path, it began to slow, until finally, it stopped several yards from the vehicle.
“Yahoo!” Tully shouted, jumping up from behind the outcropping. “It worked!”
He ran to the locomotive and climbed on.
As they came forward, Indri said, “It is probably sending an alarm to the spaceport. Someone will be along to see what is obstructing the track.”
“I don’t want to wait. Do you?”
“Not particularly,” replied the Delph. “With all the trouble in Terminus City, perhaps no one will come.”
“We’re going to have to move the buggy, then,” said Noomi, “or else the train won’t move.”
Before Tully could climb down to help, the Tatar girl told him, “No – you stay there. Your reflexes are too slow and the train might take off without you. Indri and I will handle this. Anyway, we’re stronger.”
If the Earthman took any offense at this slight to his manhood, he gave no indication of it. Instead, he made his way back along the engine car to the control room, where mechanics could access the train’s computer and engine. It was one of the few heated compartments on the train.
Indri and Noomi slowly pushed the buggy off the track. The train edged forward in response.
“You’d better go, too,” the Tatar warned Indri Mindsinger.
As the Delphite priest moved aboard the locomotive, joining Tully, Noomi Bloodgood gave the buggy another push. As strong as she was, this took some effort on her part.
The train came forward again. The Tatar girl jumped aboard the locomotive as it nudged the broken buggy from its path. As the train picked up speed, Noomi made her way along the side of the locomotive to the control compartment where Indri and Tully waited. Both were smiling.
“A very good idea, Noomi,” said the Delph as the train sped along.
A few minutes later, the cargoless train arrived at the spaceport. Coming to a near stop, it passed through an airlock that kept the facility’s atmosphere inside. The trio hopped off when the train finally came to a stop.
Things were quiet here, for there were few organic workers in the spaceport, none of whom were miners. In fact, Indri Mindsinger sensed the mood in the spaceport to be one of elation, which was puzzling to him. Nevertheless, the three sought a sheltered area and removed their atmosphere suits. They then emerged from hiding confident that they could make it to the Vimana unmolested by avoiding the cargo terminals.
The first group of men they encountered, laborers of some sort by their garb, paid the trio little heed. One of the second group, which seemed similarly disposed, hailed the three visitors to Twilight. “Have you heard the news?”
“No,” Indri called back, his curiosity aroused.
“Tri-Planetary has given up – they’ve ceded control of Twilight to us workers!” the other announced gleefully.
“The planet’s been nationalized!” whooped another.
None of the three visitors could immediately speak. Finally, Noomi said, “No wonder Weihorn didn’t let on how bad the trouble was!”
“But that means –”
“Yes, Tully,” Indri said in a resigned tone. “Both our money and our ore shipment are gone.”
Afterword
A lot of arcs are based on the idea that this setting came from a game: Players can’t become too wealthy or powerful, because it removes the motivation for their characters to go adventuring. At least that’s the way it is for many players. This comes from D&D – most players want wealth and power, rather than just playing for personal challenges like solving problems and faux danger.
So this is why the characters seem to take one step back for every two they take forward.
They are also gaining experience to face greater menaces in volumes to come.
In a SW game I ran many years ago, I had an atlas of a region of space, with details about the planets and suggestions for the types of adventures that could be had there (which was up to the gamemaster to write). I decided to base the first third of the campaign on this atlas – there would be at least one adventure on every planet in the atlas (about thirty), and when this was done, the campaign would move into phase two, which would represent the middle act in a play or film. I’m doing that to some extent here. I have the bones of an atlas, and the characters will stay within this region, a ward named the Gordian Knot. They will stay in this ward for the entire series, which runs thirty-five volumes, for reasons explained in the Afterword in volume I, Four on the Run.
Jeff Deischer
December 2017
Jeff Deischer is best known for his chronologically-minded essays, particularly the book-length The Man of Bronze: a Definitive Chronology, about the pulp DOC SAVAGE series. It is a definitive chronology, rather than the definitive chronology, he explains, because each chronologist of the DOC SAVAGE series has his own rules for constructing his own chronology. Jeff believes his own chronology to be the definitive one – using his rules, which were set down by Philip Jose Farmer in his book, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.
Jeff was born in 1961, a few years too late, in his opinion. He missed out on the Beatles, the beginning of the Marvel Age of comic books and the early years of the Bantam reprints of the DOC SAVAGE series, the latter two of which he began reading when he was about ten years old (on the other hand, he was too young to go to Viet Nam ….).
Jeff had become enamored of Heroes – with a capital “H”, for these were not ordinary men – at a very young age. He grew up watching DANIEL BOONE (to whom he is distantly related, by marriage), TARZAN, BATMAN, THE LONE RANGER and ZORRO on television. There is a large “Z” carved into his mother’s sewing machine that can attest to this fact (as you might imagine, it did not impress her the way it always did the peasants and soldiers on ZORRO).
This genre of fiction made a lasting impression on his creative view, and everything he writes has Good Guys and Bad Guys – in capital letters. As an adult writer, he tries to make his characters human, as well.
Jeff began writing as a young teenager, and, predictably, all of it was bad. He started to write seriously while in college, but spent the next decade creating characters and universes and planning stories without seeing much of it to fruition. This wasted time is his biggest regret in life.
In the early 1990s, Jeff began a correspondence with noted pulp historian and novelist Will Murray, while he was writing both the DOC SAVAGE and THE DESTROYER series (THE DESTROYER #102 is actually dedicated to Jeff). Jeff currently consults on Will Murray’s DOC SAVAGE books (as evidenced by the acknowledgements pages in the novels of “The Wild Adventures of …” series), a privilege that he enjoys. Will Murray’s sage advice helped turn Jeff into a true author.
Producing few books over the next few years, Jeff’s writing finally attained professional grade, and, after being laid off from the auto industry in 2007, he was able to devote more time to writing. From 2008, he produced an average of three books a year, most of it fiction, and most of that pulp. Reading so much of the writing of Lester Dent, the first, most prolific and best of those using the DOC SAVAGE house name “Kenneth Robeson”, Jeff’s own natur
al style is similar to Dent’s. He “turns this up” when writing pulp, and “turns this down” when writing non-pulp fiction.
Jeff primarily writes fiction, and, combining his twin loves of superheroes and pulp, began THE GOLDEN AGE series in 2012. This resurrected, revamped and revitalized the largely forgotten characters of Ned Pines’ Standard, Better and Nedor publishing companies. These characters, drawn from superhero, pulp and mystic milieus, fill the “Auric Universe”, as Jeff calls it. In 2015, he started documenting his own Argentverse, filled with characters of his own creation. It is a nostalgic look back on the comic books he read as a young teenager.
Jeff’s webpage is jeffdeischer.blogspot.com, where he posts the first chapters of his novels, so that potential readers can peruse his work without having to spend several dollars on a trade paperback to find out if they like it or not.
The Westerntainment Library
Non-Fiction
Over the Rainbow: a User’s Guide to My Dangyang by Jeff Deischer
The Marvel Timeline Project, Part 1 by Jeff Deischer and Murray Ward
The Way They Were: the Histories of Some of Adventure Fiction’s Most Famous Heroes and Villains by Jeff Deischer
The Adventures of the Man of Bronze: a Definitive Chronology (3rd ed.) by Jeff Deischer
Superhero Fiction
The Overman Paradigm by Kim Williamson
The Golden Age, Volume II: Mystico by Jeff Deischer
The Golden Age, Volume III: Dark of the Moon by Jeff Deischer
The Golden Age, Volume IV by Jeff Deischer
The Golden Age, Volume X: Future Tense by Jeff Deischer
The Golden Age, Volume XI: Bad Moon Rising by Jeff Deischer
The Steel Ring by R. A. Jones
TheTwilight War by R. A. Jones
Argent by Jeff Deischer
Night of the Owl (Argent) by Jeff Deischer
The Superlatives (Argent) by Jeff Deischer
Four in the Way Page 9