by D L Frizzell
Hathan-Fen looked at the brown puddle with pure disgust. “You just had to do that.”
“Yup,” Redland said. “Didn’t touch you, did it?”
Norio was already in the last compartment waiting for me, having spread our allotment of coats against the seat. Brady and Traore were back in their compartment, the only difference being that the folding table had been stowed into the wall and the extra space was filled with jackets.
“Did you fix the brakes?” Norio asked when I climbed in to join him.
“Not exactly,” I said. I tightened our makeshift restraints and leaned out the compartment to see Ofsalle staring worriedly at me from the open cockpit. I gave him a thumbs up and settled into the seat. “Hang on, Norio.”
Ofsalle had resisted my plan, telling me several times the train was not designed for this kind of abuse. I explained that we had no choice, and he finally agreed. The key was the sap motor; it operated a dynamo that stabilized the magnetic field around the train. I assured him the dynamo would gradually lose power as it spun down and the train should sustain little, if any, damage. It was a total lie, of course – I remembered what happened to my aerobike. My rationale in this case was that we were in a confined tube, so the train couldn’t possibly go off course. I hoped that was the case, anyway.
A second later, the sap motor rasped to a stop and the train dropped hard onto the tunnel floor. The ear-splitting squeal of metal on metal echoed through the train. Loose gear tumbled out of the cargo compartments, and the overhead chemical lamps bounced against their tethers. My biggest concern was the shock absorbing linkages crisscrossing the train. If they did their job, we had a fair chance of surviving.
I thought the first impact would be the only one, since it was a drop of less than a meter. The blue tunnel wall was extremely smooth and should have brought us to a slow and gradual stop. The train bounced instead – no, it ricocheted – inside the tunnel. It’s a good thing I had everybody tie themselves in with ropes, more for reassurance than functionality at the time, but they kept us in our seats as the train caterpillared down the tunnel. I heard plenty of cursing from the other compartments, but the train finally settled down into the flat slide I expected from the get-go. Too bad we were upside down.
A minute later the train jounced again, as badly as the first time. I wondered if Ofsalle neglected to tell me about more cracks in the tunnel wall. After my teeth rattled for several seconds, the ride smoothed out and I thought we were in the clear.
The train bounced a third time, and this time rolled over on its side before settling down to yet another uneasy equilibrium.
The worst has to be over, I told myself.
I don’t know why I keep trying to predict these things because I’m wrong a lot lately. We hit another rough spot, quicker this time. Norio and I both yelped in surprise, and then stared at each other for the long seconds it took for the train to right itself. No sooner had the train leveled out than we hit another obstacle. And then another. And another. Most of the chemical lamps came loose and rolled into the trains’ various crevices, leaving us in complete darkness save for the sparks that found their way through the hinges in the hull plates. So much for a smooth ride, I thought to myself as the screeching noises from the hull got increasingly louder.
After performing a complete roll, the train somehow managed to right itself again, more or less, and stayed there as we continued thudding along the tunnel floor. Whatever we kept hitting, they were very big.
That’s the moment I saw the rear cockpit of the train disappear in a shower of sparks.
I have never been so scared in my life than that moment, and I don’t scare easily. I looked to my right to see what Norio’s response was. It wasn’t Norio; It was Rannuk Ofsalle. He held my two scavenger birds in his arms, cradling them against the squealing chaos and the windy vortex that filled the cockpit.
I was apparently hallucinating. Maybe the repeated bouncing compounded my head injury. For now, there was nothing to do but finish the ride. I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated. If Ofsalle was really a doctor, he could examine me afterward. I opened my eyes and looked right again. Norio was there, as he’d been just a few seconds earlier. The rest of the compartment was also restored, without the damage I’d just imagined.
The train listed badly by the time it stopped, with the corridor being downhill from the passenger compartments. At least we’re not upside down, I thought. I untied my rope and lowered my feet onto the curved outer hull. The hinges gave way a little, not as much as when we were levitated, but with a noticeable crunch that sounded like I was walking on gravel. Some of the linkages had torn apart, making it easier to move down the corridor, though the ceiling was now much lower. The smell of burnt sap filled my nostrils.
“Everybody stay where you are,” I called to the others. “Give the hull a chance to cool before we break the seal.”
“The hell with that,” Hathan-Fen called out, and dropped out of her compartment. Redland stayed out of sight.
We made it! Kate exalted in her mind.
“Yes, we did,” I said aloud.
“Yes, we did…what?” Norio said.
Chapter Seventeen
The air in the train grew cold. As in frozen. Everybody’s breath condensed in billows of frost as they rushed to put on the jackets they’d just used for cushions. Hathan-Fen made her way to me through the disjointed shock absorbers while Redland went into the forward cockpit where we’d thrown the rest of the gear.
Hathan-Fen threw a punch at my face, but my reflexes being what they are, I deflected it. She then kicked me in the shin, which I had no room to dodge.
“I deserved that,” I said.
“Get out of my way,” she seethed.
I stepped back into my compartment with Norio until she made it past me.
Norio put his hand on my shoulder. “That was an interesting solution to our dilemma.”
“Don’t tell me I did anything special,” I said. “Turning off the motor was the only thing we could have done. I’m surprised you didn’t suggest it yourself.”
“I would not have believed in such a plan,” Norio shook his head. “You, however, saw that it would work.”
“We were desperate,” I said.
“You thrive in desperate environments,” he replied, “and these are desperate days. I am glad you are here.”
“Whatever,” I said. He didn’t feel that way about me twelve hours ago, so it seemed disingenuous that he would approve of my methods now. I donned a jacket, grabbed the rest of my things, and followed Hathan-Fen toward the rear cockpit. She knew where the exit would be, and that’s where I wanted to go also.
Brady and Traore were joking around as they left their compartment. Apparently, the last five minutes were the most fun they’d had in a long time. They slapped me on the back, making promises for the first round at the next drinkery we came across.
Doctor Ofsalle was much less pleased to see me. He stood by the sap engine, his arms covered in grease. “It appears we will return north by more conventional means,” he scowled. “Do you have any idea what it took to get this train operational?”
“No,” I said, not caring about his disapproval. “Where’s the door?”
“There,” he replied, and waved a hand dismissively toward the rear of the train.
I made my way around him and saw why he was so upset. The train had come apart. Several hull plates dangled, only half-connected. The windshield was nowhere to be seen. The only illumination came from a couple of chemical lamps on the tunnel floor. The damage looked eerily similar to the vision I saw while the train was grinding to a halt.
Where is Kate? I thought, unable to read her mind anymore. Turning to Ofsalle, I asked, “Where is Kate?” He didn’t answer, pausing only long enough to make a rude gesture that suggested I should leave him alone. I looked down the dark tunnel behind the train. Unless Kate planned to walk back to Dogleg, she would have continued in the direction we were travelin
g. I could see daylight around the ragged edges of the train, so it only made sense to go that way myself. I grabbed one of the fallen chemical lights and climbed up a series of uneven hull plates onto the train’s scarred and twisted frame.
There was plenty of room to stand atop the train, so I walked quickly toward the far end. My boots still crunched as I walked, and I noticed what was making the sound. The metal hull plates had been melted by friction, their outer surfaces being filed off in a gritty powder. This was my first look at that train from the outside, but it wasn’t what I expected. Curved metallic beams that lay broken along the hull in jagged segments, as thick as girders with thick wiring running through their inner contours. I looked on both sides of the train and saw the beams were ring-shaped, with a diameter that matched the tunnel width. These iron beams were electromagnets, I thought, or used to be until the train hit them. Well, that explained the jarring during the train’s deceleration. I sure wish Ofsalle had told me these obstacles were there, but it didn’t really matter in the end. They stopped us.
I moved along the train to the forward cockpit and saw that more chemical lamps had been activated inside the cracked canopy. I watched Redland digging through the piles of gear, unaware of my presence above. His right eye was red and swollen, looking suspiciously like he hadn’t been able to avoid the same punch that Hathan-Fen tried to hit me with. He carried a weariness in his gaze, the kind caused by more than a lack of sleep. IT told me he’d just as soon park his ass on those jackets and let the world go to hell.
Somehow, I understood why he might feel that way.
When he noticed me, his expression transformed to one of defiance. He muttered something. I’m not a lip reader so I can’t say what it was, but it certainly didn’t appear friendly. I gave Redland a mock salute, and then climbed down the damaged hull to the tunnel floor below.
Thanks to a light source in the far distance, I saw Kate’s footprints in the frost. I checked my weapons, adjusted my hat, and followed them.
More iron rings lined the tunnel ahead of the train, each no more than a few meters apart. Connected by the same heavy copper wires I saw tangled around the train, I realized their purpose. They comprised the mechanism Ofsalle had tried to describe. I’d seen one demonstrated in a physics class during my college years. It’s what Ofsalle had referred to as a magnetic accelerator, but I knew it as a mass driver. I’m not sure that we couldn’t have leveraged that to stop the train, but chalked it up to the notion that Ofsalle and Redland together probably only half-understood the theory of magnetic propulsion.
The blue tunnel was alien in origin – T’Neth, I admitted grimly – but the iron rings themselves had been made by human hands. Half a meter thick, each ring must have weighed several tons. Even split into quarter sections as the rivets suggested, they would have been unwieldy and conspicuous. Nobody could have gotten them to the tunnel without being seen. The amount of time and manpower required to assemble a massive contraption stretching for what must have been fifty kilometers would be mind-boggling. I could see no way for anybody to construct this train system without everybody in the world knowing about it. Surely, I would’ve heard something from my contacts in the shifty network. Information on such a project would be impossible to hide for very long, and shifties specialized in discovering those kinds of secrets.
I knelt down to look closer at one of the rings. Brushing the frost away, I uncovered the seal of Istok Casting, one of the original metalworking facilities set up by the Founders. That foundry had been abandoned since a magnetic quake leveled their facility and killed dozens of workers over four hundred years ago. Could this mass driver be that old? I wondered. I filed the question away. The answers might lie ahead, I guessed, maybe at the source of the faraway light. I continued onward.
I approached the ‘station’ a few kilometers later. To my surprise, it wasn’t daylight that illuminated the tunnel, but another electric spotlight like the one I’d seen on the train. It was too bright to stare into, so I lowered the brim of my hat and focused more on stepping over the iron rings.
The spacing between the magnetic rings decreased to less than a meter by the time I reached the station. The spotlight sat in the center of the tunnel, supported by a framework of wooden beams and aluminum rods. A makeshift deck that extended on both sides was probably what people used to board the train before the magnetic rings launched it into the tunnel. I shielded my eyes from the spotlight and climbed up, imagining the station beneath Dogleg’s scrap yard looked very similar.
Once behind the light, I looked around. Toolboxes, shelving units, pieces of Founders Tech and T’Neth metal fragments were everywhere. It looked like someone had been trying to fit the pieces of different jigsaw puzzles into a new one, not altogether successfully. Hull plates were piled in a large metal bin. It looked as if they’d been traded out the way a used tire might be replaced on a vehicle.
Kate had been easy to follow to this point, having left the only set of tracks to follow. There were now many sets of tracks crisscrossing one other. One of them appeared to be a large field boot, the kind that Redland wore. Hathan-Fen mentioned earlier that Redland had a hand in making the train a reality. He knew how to operate it, at least to some degree, so those must have been his tracks. Some smaller tracks were probably left by Ofsalle, while others were too scuffed to identify. At first, I thought that’s all there was to find, but I soon noticed a fainter set of tracks mingled among the others. I knew without a doubt they belonged to Norio, a man who seemed to have visited every spot on the planet at least once. The only tracks I couldn’t find were Kate’s.
Putting aside my questions about Norio’s involvement with just about every new revelation in my life, I decided to make my way past the various piles of junk until I ran into Kate. I marveled at the mixture of complexity and clumsiness in each attempt at building a magnetically levitated train. Even more interesting was the fact that all the iron pieces strewn about were covered in both dust and ice. These objects had been immobile for centuries. But how did this tunnel get rediscovered? I asked myself. Yes, another damn question I didn’t have an answer for. Redland and Ofsalle could hardly be considered experts, but they apparently knew more than anybody else. They must have been the ones who found it. So, how did they make the evolutionary leap to convert the Jolly Worm from scrap pile to rocket train? I walked around the junk, thinking I’d find both the answers eventually.
I made my way further along the decking, but all I found was greater piles of mechanical refuse. I even found what I guessed to be the skeleton of an earlier version of the train, this one narrower and shorter, capable of holding only a handful of people and traveling at much slower speeds. I had a gut-level feeling of unease as I climbed over the final piles of technological garbage, some of which had been long-exposed to the elements, while other pieces looked almost new. The mounds weren’t organized at all; they’d been shoved back into the tunnel to get them out of the way. My apprehension became reality when I squeezed past a tarp-covered object that nearly filled the tunnel and discovered that it was the end of the line. A wall of rocky sediment blocked any further travel.
It looked like there’d been a cave-in, maybe thousands of years ago, that crushed the tunnel in this spot. There was no ladder, no stairway, no door, and no train to take us back to Dogleg. Moving back the way I came, I pulled the tarp off the object. A tiny bulb flickered on a panel next to a rocker switch with a single word scratched into the metal in blocky letters. It said ‘Power’. A few centimeters to the left, a rudimentary spring-loaded kitchen gadget with hash marks around a central knob had been strapped to the console. So that’s how they got the train moving, I realized. They hot-wired an old fusion generator with an egg timer. I lowered my estimation of Redland’s and Ofsalle’s engineering skill, while upping my estimate of our unbelievable good luck at having survived the trip.
So, we were stuck at the end of a very long tunnel with no exit and no way back to Dogleg. Short of walking,
anyway. The thought reminded me of the nest of rodents I caught on the plains. We were trapped. The only thing left to do was wait for the inevitable arrival of the T’Neth, who might simply kill us when they found us.
Another thought hit me. If there was no way out, then where was Kate? I’d lost her footsteps because of the bright spotlight and then reached the station without finding her. I stopped to listen for the sound of her mind. I sensed nothing.
“You’re not goin’ to find what you’re lookin’ for, kid!” Redland shouted from the tunnel beyond the deck.
I made my way back through the junk and saw him standing in the light. Kate wasn’t there, but everybody else was, each of them dressed warmly with heavy field packs on. They all had Longarms slung over their shoulders, ready for action.
“Where did Kate go?” I asked.
“The girl figured out the exit on her own,” Redland scoffed. “You missed it completely, smart man.”
I jumped off the platform and faced Redland. “That’s because I’ve never been here,” I said.
“Neither has she,” Hathan-Fen told me. “As far as we know, she has never been in any of these tunnels before.”
“Not since she was a child,” Norio said.
Hathan-Fen gave Norio a cross look. “You want to explain that statement?”
Norio gave Hathan-Fen the same matter-of-fact expression that always used to piss me off when I was a teenager. “I have known her for a long time, Major.”
“Since she was a kid?” Hathan-Fen seethed.
“Watch out for her right jab,” Redland mumbled to Norio.
“She kicks, too,” I added, inadvertently agreeing with Redland.
“She fled her people,” Norio said. “Why do you think she calls herself Kate Runaway?”
“Let’s just find the portal,” Hathan-Fen said, throwing up her arms in frustration. She turned and headed away from the platform.
A few hundred meters back into the tunnel, Redland held up his hand for everybody to stop. We gathered between two iron rings spaced further apart than the others. He pointed up at a circular outline about half the width of the tunnel in the blue metal overhead. I hadn’t noticed it earlier because of the spotlight’s glare.