Man Vs Machine

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  Ignatio climbed the gangway, and stood blinking in bright sunlight. Asuncion was wearing around to bring her back toward the stern of the enemy ship, the crew working frantically on the rigging and yards. There was sand on the deck and the smell of black powder and . . . he did not know at first, and then a part of his brain said it was blood and excreta, and he thought he should have known that without thinking. He saw Captain Don Cayetano Gravina leaning against the railing near the stern of the ship, blood soaking his right leg below the knee.

  “Please, God,” Ignatio prayed aloud. “Not him.”

  The captain looked in his direction as if he had heard the words, and stared at him as if he did not recognize Ignatio at all.

  Why should he? Ignatio asked himself, but feeling hurt nonetheless.

  Then something changed in the captain’s expression, and he waved the boy forward. Ignatio went to him and, not knowing what to do with his hands, held them stiffly by his side.

  “You are Ignatio Mendez,” the man said.

  “Yes, Captain. At least, I am Ignatio.”

  “You are not at your post.”

  “It is gone, Captain.”

  “Ah, I see. Then stand behind me. I would not have you shot needlessly.”

  Ignatio smiled, as if God himself had blessed him. To stand behind the captain himself! This was . . .

  His attention was caught by a series of flashes from the enemy ship, then the sound of many cannon firing.

  “Hold on, boy,” the captain said.

  Ignatio could see the balls arching towards them. Even as he watched, they hit the water, one after the other, about two-thirds of the distance between the two ships, then skipped into the air again. He watched the closest until it disappeared beneath the rise of the quarterdeck and he felt the hull shudder with the impact. The next slapped onto the quarterdeck and bounced into the sea on the other side, causing no damage at all. Then the ship vibrated with another blow. And that was it.

  “Well and good,” the captain said as Asunci’n moved away from the firing arc of Mars’ broadside and towards its stern for a second pass. “And now it is our turn again.”

  As soon as the battle commenced, Gravina had opened a link to the Novae. What happened would be recorded and analyzed by millions of his kind for a hundred years, more if he won the battle, something that occurred not nearly as frequently as they had expected when these Reiterations were first started nearly ten thousand years before. They never had any difficulty recruiting humans to play the enemy, but despite tangible rewards they were rarely able to recruit humans to fight for them. In the end their biological warriors had to be vat grown and implanted with memories made up from tens of millions of interrogated, tortured, duped, drugged and dissected humans.

  At first, the link brought little attention, but after Asuncio’n’s first successful pass behind Mars, the connections had picked up. Gravina did a quick count and was impressed. Nearly three per cent of the Novae in this system were doing nothing except watching the progress of his battle, something like seven million of them, including many in fugueships in orbit around this planet.

  Gravina ordered his marines, and those sailors that could be spared, to prepare a boarding party. As soon as his second broadside struck Mars, he would order a general assault. All they needed to do was clear the poop and quarterdeck and they could keep the enemy from regaining control; then the ship would be recognized by the umpire as his prize. Many of his human enemies would then commit suicide rather than become prisoners of the Novae, something Gravina would regret but at the same time admire.

  And then he noticed Asunci’n was coming up on Mars much too quickly, as if the frigate had suddenly and inexplicably accelerated. It took even his mind a fraction of a second to realize it was the enemy ship closing the distance by the simple expedient of swinging the yards so the sails backfilled, slowing the ship and then pushing her sternward. He glanced up and saw a mass of enemy marines ready to board Asunción , far more than he calculated Mars should be carrying.

  Gravina shouted for the guns to fire, but it was too late. The gun crews, taken by surprise, aimed badly, and only two shots actually the struck the enemy ship. Then ropes and hooks dropped onto the deck of Asunción, and the enemy came, shouting, screaming, hating, all of them making for Gravina.

  He defended himself more than ably, killing several humans, but in the end one of them managed to pierce his neck with the point of a cutlass and then release the nanostream that would counter and then overwhelm his own defences. Almost immediately he felt his upper mental functions degrade. The enemy pulled back, sensing he was destroyed and there was nothing more they could do to hasten it. Gravina slowly slumped to the deck of his lovely Asunción, brave Asunción, and saw the face of Ignatio Mendez. The boy was crying, struggling in the arms of his captors. Gravina found himself hoping they would treat Ignatio well; it did not always happen that way—in the heat of battle humans were crueler to their own kind than the Novae had ever been—but sometimes they were gentle with children.

  The last thing he realized, as the link with the Novae broke up and then dissolved with the ceramic architecture of the brain case held behind his armored chest, was that the feeling he had for the boy was totally unexpected. No doubt the result of the chaos of his consciousness evaporating with his life, but it occurred to him that the feeling was almost human.

  It was the last thought he ever had.

  Stalking Old John Bull

  By Jean Rabe

  Jean Rabe is the author of more than twenty novels and more than forty short stories. In addition, she has edited several DAW anthologies. When she’s not writing (which isn’t often), she delights in the company of her two aging dogs, dangles her feet in her backyard goldfish pond, and pretends to garden. She loves museums, books, boardgames, role-playing games, wargames, and movies that ‘blow up real good.’ Visit her web site at: www.jeanrabe.com.

  I spent my thirteenth birthday in the Thornton Street Cemetery off Westgate in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, watching them lower my father into the ground. Barely listening to the service, I was numb and angry and filled with thoughts no one my age should have. Two-hundred and fifty square yards of land, and my father’s grave sat roughly in the middle of it, shaded by an elm with knobby, ugly roots. There was a plot reserved next to it for my mother, who was buried a month later, dead of a broken heart. I used what money they’d saved up in a pantry jar to buy them a small stone, rosy marble and shiny as wet glass—something I thought I might like on my own grave. But the cemetery would fill up decades before I could return to England and join them.

  My father was a welder at Robert Stephenson and Company, a place I’d planned to work when I finished the eighth grade. The company made locomotives, and the one my father welded on—when a massive curl of iron being laid over the engine fell and crushed his chest—was bound for the Camden & Amboy Railroad in the United States of America.

  The demon responsible for my parents’ deaths was finished on June 18th, 1831. I began stalking it a few weeks later when I pinched some money from the aunt I’d been foisted upon and bought a new change of clothes and a ticket to Liverpool. There, I managed to slip on board the Allegheny, the ship they’d crated the demon in. A lot of people boarded that July morning, almost all of them workers from what I could tell, and I was small and quick and squirmed my way through them without getting caught. I found a place to hide in the cargo hold, where once we were at sea—and after three solid days of retching from seasickness—I began my mission.

  Had I not been so young, I might not have directed my ire at the locomotive. I might have realized that it wasn’t truly a demon, that it was just a machine, some huge metal steam contraption that burned wood and didn’t think or feel and that wasn’t capable of doing anything on its own. I might have instead singled out Robert Stephenson himself, who could not be bothered to come to my father’s funeral, or the men holding the iron sheet they’d let drop. I even might have accepted that it
was all just a horrible accident, that terrible things happen to good people, and that nothing I could do would bring my father and mother back.

  But I was only thirteen and so did not think like a rational man. I was strong-minded born of an anger I could not comprehend at the time, childish and reckless. Impetuous, puerile, frightened, angry, and confused—I was all of those things, too, and more in that miserable year. Above everything, I was lonely and filled with a profound grief I could not master, and I was determined to destroy the iron demon that had ruined my perfect world.

  Perhaps I thought slaying it would ease my pain.

  It took me an entire day to find the crates the sections of the locomotive were stored in, two days more to discover an oddly thin box that was filled with the diagrams for assembling the engine. I studied the papers, only halfway understanding how the pieces would go together and not at all understanding how it was intended to operate.

  I memorized what I could, because I wanted to know my enemy and because I had little else to occupy me in the hold. According to the diagrams, the driver diameter was fifty-four inches, and the tender weighed ten tons. The height, to the top of its smoke stack, was a little more than eleven feet, with a width of seven feet, eight inches, and a length of thirty-six feet. It had eighty-two boiler tubes and a boiler pressure of sixty pounds per square inch.

  I learned that the boiler consisted of a brass casting mounted to the top of a low dome above a firebox. Like the early “Bury boiler,” it allowed for more steam room. In later years I would learn that a cylindrical boiler would produce higher steam pressure. Also in those later years I would learn quite a lot more about trains.

  I must have studied the diagrams a hundred times before I tore them into tiny pieces—an act that only temporarily quenched my rage. And, making several trips so I wouldn’t stop up anything and draw attention to myself, I washed the bits down a drain in a bathroom I found on the lowest level.

  Without the diagrams, I knew the engineers in New Jersey could not get the demon running. And so I settled into my hidey-hole, emerging to find food when I was hungry, to borrow clothes the crew inadvertently left out, and to explore when nearly everyone else slept.

  I spent the time dreaming of where I would go and what I might do in America.

  Sometimes I spent it thinking about the demon.

  And after a month—I was guessing at the passing of days—I worried that perhaps the American engineers could indeed reconstruct it, or at the very least would contact the Robert Stephenson and Company and ask for another set of plans.

  I hadn’t the tools or the strength to demolish the large iron pieces; I found it difficult enough even to open the crates. But I managed to take many of the smaller parts out and drop them over the side late at night, burying them at sea as the demon had buried my father, resealing the crates and again dreaming of what America would hold for me.

  We docked in September at the mouth of the Delaware River in Philadelphia. I scurried onto the shore and watched them reload the crates onto a river schooner. It was evening, and the water was dark and smooth, and tugs anchored on the opposite side had lights burning, an oily yellow color I found unsettling. From somewhere up the bank behind me I heard music, an unfamiliar but pleasing tune, and soft laughter. I thought about heading in that direction and finding something to eat.

  I knew I’d rendered the demon useless and so should move on with my life in this new world. But a part of me couldn’t let it go. And so rather than discover the wonders of Pennsylvania, I hid aboard the boat, which traveled up river to an unsightly place called Bordentown, New Jersey. I didn’t care for the city, but I had to stay, wanting to hear of the railroad men’s frustration that the locomotive would not work. I needed to relish my victory, and I needed to make some money to survive.

  I delivered newspapers and groceries, staying in a dilapidated three-storey boarding house and making a few friends who were a year or two older than me. I saved all of my coins and considered purchasing passage west . . . I’d read so much about Colorado in the paper and in magazines we’d rescue from the drugstore trash bins! But there were unpleasant tidbits slipping out of the rail yards, and so I couldn’t leave yet.

  I cut near the yards on my various routes, tarrying to talk to engineers, professing great interest in them and their work, and being rewarded with grand tales of America’s growing railways.

  I learned that American engineers were indeed clever. One named Isaac Dripps, who sometimes shared his sandwich with me, managed to piece the engine together, despite the lack of diagrams. And he’d managed to acquire replacement parts for the ones I’d commended to the ocean.

  I also learned that they called the engine “Number 1,” as it was New Jersey’s first, then officially christened it “Stevens,” as that was the last name of Camden & Amboy’s president. But Dripps and the other railroad men had a different name for it—The Old John Bull—after some cartoon rendering that referred to England. ‘Stevens’ didn’t take, but John Bull did.

  Dripps proudly showed the demon to me one late October afternoon. The ghastly thing puffed in all its glory. It was a black and gray monster gleaming dully in the sun, stinking and hissing and belching steam into a bright blue sky. I gagged at the scent of it, eyes locked onto the welds that my father had made, the curl of iron that had taken his breath and then claimed my mother, taken everyone and everything that meant something to me.

  I glared at its four-wheels and piston rods hooked to the crank on its rear axle. I spat at the front drivers locked to the rear ones by more rods. I felt my chest grow tight, my lungs filled with the horrid, acrid plumes, my eyes burning from the heat. I couldn’t speak, my throat and mouth had gone dry.

  I was thoroughly consumed with anger—at the demon that hadn’t died and at myself because I hadn’t managed to slay it. I tarried around the track so much after that, quietly seething. Most of the men got to know me, thinking me some wide-eyed boy in love with trains. And on November 1st a foreman offered me hard, hurtful work that paid no better than delivering newspapers and groceries. I immediately accepted, wanting to be close to “John Bull,” where I knew I would find an opportunity to destroy it.

  The C & A hadn’t enough track at first to operate the locomotive. However, I and others worked long hours to construct a sufficient length. And while we sweated and ached, and while our fingers cracked and bled, the engineers started designing more locomotives patterned after the Bull. They made their own frames, wheels, and boilers, but they ordered other parts from Stephenson in England.

  It was later in my first month at the C & A, November the 12th, that New Jersey politicians and some local aristocrats, among them Prince Murat—Napoleon’s nephew—were invited for rides on a ‘test track’ we’d laid out. I was in the crowd watching when Murat’s wife dashed on board, announcing that she wanted to be remembered as the first woman to ride a steam-driven train in the States.

  She didn’t know—no one did—that I’d sabotaged it, chiseling away at the wood drivers, sending slivers into my calloused fingers and knowing that I would keep it from rolling on the track I’d helped build.

  But again I’d been thwarted. The C & A chief engineer had replaced the broken wood drivers with ones made of harder wood laced with metal stringers along the top. He hadn’t spotted my foul work, I later learned, and had all along intended to replace them because America’s iron tracks were different from those used in England. Sturdier drivers were necessary to handle this country’s uneven terrain.

  And so the demon gave the politicians and Napoleon’s relatives a ride.

  And so I went back to scheming John Bull’s demise.

  My work on track laying was poor, on purpose, and the following spring would prove to cause blessed problems that brought a rare smile to my face. The Bull had what was called a 0-4-0 rigid wheel arrangement, and so it derailed on curves . . . where I’d shoddily earned my wage.

  Over and over the engine slipped from the tracks.<
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  I’d thought this would cause the railroad owners to retire it and replace it with something else. Retiring it would be acceptable, I’d convinced myself. Retiring it and melting it down and sending it to the deepest pits of hell.

  But the engineers added pilot wheels to the Bull. Hooking them with wooden beams to the front axle, they allowed the engine to turn ever-so-slightly, which solved the derailing issue. Still, they had to remove the rods connecting the front and back drivers, a move I thought would cripple the Bull, but instead only changed its configuration to a 4-2-0, meaning only the back two wheels of the locomotive were powered. It was a more efficient design . . . one I’d brought about through my terror campaign.

  I’d managed to damage the boiler several times, slipping into the yard late at night and using tools that had not been locked away. I smashed dials, ruined the engineer’s seat, broke couplings, and more. Each time they repaired it, and the newspaper carried articles about vandals terrorizing C & A. Night watchmen were hired, and so my forays to directly sabotage the demon had been curtailed. Police patrolled the yards more frequently, and I had to take another approach.

  I bought just enough stock so I could attend share-holder’s meetings if I desired—so I could keep up on news about John Bull and the other engines. Then I quit the railway and traveled from town to town along the Bull’s route, finding odd jobs to pay for food and clothes and supplies I used to unsuccessfully ruin the rails. I remember a night in Indiana. I was sixteen then, almost seventeen, and everything I owned was in a worn canvas satchel I lugged with me. I sat on a rise, looking down on the tracks, the breeze cool on the back of my neck and blowing my scraggly hair . . . I cut it myself with a pocketknife, so it was uneven and sometimes almost comical looking. I fixed my eyes on the line, blackest-black under a half-full moon.

  I drew my knees in close to my chest and rested my hands around my ankles. I tipped my face up and closed my eyes and listened. A few miles outside of the nearest town there were no people-sounds, just the rustle of tall grass and the occasional snap of a twig from the trees behind me. I imagined deer and wild pigs were moving around, and I wondered what it would have been like to have been one of the first settlers in this place, living off the land and not worrying about demon-trains.