Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50

by John Joseph Adams

  They settled on the narrow platform at the back of the coal car, keeping hold of a railing there, while the engine slipped through the yard and out of town. It ran smoothly, its hum almost out of hearing; all she heard was the rhythmic clanking of wheel on track. But the machinery before her was like the gaping maw of some fantastical creature.

  Tubing and glowing wires looped out from the cab across the coupling to the coal car—the tender. The ends trailed off, fused to the steel sides. The tender itself was empty—unnecessary, once the engine had been converted. Inside, the cab was filled with twisted mechanisms that seem to have grown rather than been built. The controls and levers had been obscured, only visible if you knew where to look. The door to the furnace was open, and the green of the Aetherian generator inside pulsed. Nothing came out of the chimney but an occasional green spark. As Cooper and Finch had said, there was no sign of a driver, an engineer, or anyone else. The thing was entirely autonomous.

  Marlowe used his spyglass to study components of the engine. “I think—I believe much of the mechanism has grown from the original alterations. It’s not unheard of; some wiring from the Surrey crash seemed to have plant-like properties. Some samples kept sealed in a box were discovered years later to have grown. Nothing like this.” He leaned out, keeping one hand on the railing, for a better look at the outside. “There—that’s the standard retrofit. Everything else was added, and not by any known principles of Aetherian mechanics.”

  “So we’re dealing with unknown principles. Is there some mad scientist in the hills making alterations, then sending the thing back? Murdering those who try to stop him?”

  “An American mad scientist would be trying to patent the thing, I expect,” he said.

  “Then what if someone found a cache of Aetherian artifacts of unknown properties, introduced them to this engine, and got far more than they expected?”

  He nodded. “If some prospector found a previously unknown Aetherian crash site in these mountains—well, anything could happen.”

  They were outside the town now, and the locomotive seemed to accelerate. They still had time to jump without being seriously injured. Soon they would reach the hills and mountains beyond. The sky overhead was searing blue. With no choking coal smoke pouring from the engine, she could smell fresh, chill air from the mountains.

  Marlowe continued. “I expect what we’ll find is some camp in the mountains. Someone’s altered the engine with some new artifact they found, but they can’t shut it down, and so it keeps running this route via some kind of automatic instructions built into this new wiring. When someone rides the train up, they’re taken prisoner, and there you have your haunted locomotive.”

  “So what will we do when we get there, reason with them?”

  “That’s your job,” he said archly. “For my part, I think I can disable the engine, just as soon as I find the nonstandard component. Remove it, see what makes it tick, get the thing back under control. I imagine our amateur engineer will be grateful.”

  They studied the weird mechanics grown in and around the cab, searching for that nonstandard component, that thing that didn’t look familiar or right. Really, the entire locomotive was unfamiliar and wrong, so trying to find just one aberration was difficult. In fact, the more she looked, the more wrong it looked. Not just unsettling—no matter how much she and her world depended on Aetherian machinery, she’d always felt some discomfort around the more extreme examples—but deeply wrong.

  Finally, Marlowe said, “I think . . . ah yes, that’s new. There’s a touch of red in the firebox. I thought it was overheated metal, but I think it’s an independent source of radiation.”

  “Marlowe, let me see that a moment.” She held her hand out, and he gave her the spyglass.

  Stretching up, anchoring against the railing at the back of the tender, she looked through it, not at the mechanical parts of the engine, the glowing of the firebox—she saw the spot of red Marlowe mentioned, like a candle in a fogbank—and adjustments made to the valves and rods. She focused on the shadows inside the cab, on vague details hidden there.

  A bit of red fabric, like from a kerchief worn about the neck, fluttered in a corner. A few feet beyond it, a tuft of brown hair sprouted from a pressure gauge. Near the roof was a hand, colored green as if grown over with moss, pierced through with glowing Aetherian wires.

  Harry lowered the spyglass and settled on the platform. “Marlowe, I think we’ve got to get off this thing.”

  “Do you know how fast we’re going?”

  She spared a glance; the valley’s grassy meadow slipped by in a blur. Trees of the forest ahead were now visible. They could no longer leave the train without being smashed on the ground.

  She said, “Look in the cab, at the roof above the gauges.”

  He took the spyglass, and she pointed out the details she’d found, the odd human scraps among the alien whole.

  “We’ve got to slow down at some point,” he said.

  “Yes, and we’ve got to stop the thing,” she answered. “Before it kills us.”

  What had started as a treasure hunt, a search for new and unknown Aetherian artifacts to advance British supremacy, had become a bit more serious.

  “We’re already ahead of the game,” he said. “The others—the unfortunate drivers, the bounty hunters who boarded later—all entered by the cabin. They thought to control the train from there. It would have been intuitive. We’ve come at it roundabout. That gives us a little time, yes?”

  Marlowe moved inside the coal car, braced up against the wall to shelter from the wind now whipping past the speeding train. Searching through the pouches slung over his shoulder, he gathered bits and pieces, wires and clamps. He obviously had a plan.

  The air was growing cold. The train had entered a wooded stretch, and the mountains now rose up around them. Still, they were accelerating. How the train could navigate the mountain tracks at this speed, she didn’t know.

  He put a pair of needle-nosed pliers in his mouth while he fished for another piece out of a pouch. He was building something, right there amidst the rocking and shaking of the train. It had a lot of spiky bits and some kind of filament in the center that looked flammable.

  “What exactly is it you’re making?”

  “A bypass . . . I think. To bleed off some of that power it’s using.”

  They were roaring through the forest, moving faster than metal wheels on a metal track ought to be able to move. The trees passed by in a blur.

  “Done,” Marlowe said, shoving tools back into pouches and pulling himself to his feet. He held an object about the size of an apple, vaguely spider-shaped, with wires sticking out as legs, barbs at the tips looking like weapons. The body of it was a collection of loops and circuits and diodes. A filament glowed green with incipient power. “A bit of a prayer may be in order.”

  He then threw the device before Harry had time to make that prayer.

  It sailed straight and true into the cab and stuck on one of the growths, a bottle-thick metallic coil pressing out against the walls. The barbed feet dug in, a crackle of energy burst from the device, sending green sparks throughout the cab. The invading growths seemed to flinch.

  In just a second, the hum of the engines, as well as the sickly glow, increased.

  “Marlowe,” she murmured, drawing her pistol from its holster. He looked up at what had caught her attention.

  The organic mound of machinery that had sprawled from the cab into the coal car had begun to move. Not quickly, not purposefully. It was more that it throbbed, as if some burrowing thing was making its way underneath the coiled and twisted surface. At the edges of the mound, wires emerged, sprouting out from the steel, stretching toward the newcomers, the invaders.

  Aiming her pistol low, she fired across the front of the mound, the beam of energy frying the tendrils before they could progress further. The coiled mound shuddered, drew back. The humming of the engine took on a low, r
ough undertone, almost a growl. The light in the firebox flared red.

  “I don’t think your trinket bypassed much of anything,” she muttered.

  “Well, I tried,” he said, put out.

  She lurched, falling against the side of the car. They hadn’t hit anything; the train was on a straightaway—no sharp turns ahead or behind. But the metal underneath her feet was moving.

  The sides of the coal car bowed outward. The roof of the cab had swelled, and the cab’s windows warped into gaping circles. The very steel of the original train was expanding. Not melting, because there was no heat, but somehow the structure of the metal was changing as the Aetherian coils mounded inside the cab grew, puffed up, and expanded outward. In the cab, pieces of bodies bloated outward, and they looked as if they had been eaten, skin flayed, bone pocked with holes, blood entirely drained. The monster might have been sucking them for more power, using them to become ever larger. The bounty hunters who’d come to tame the beast had only helped it grow.

  Meanwhile, Harry fired again at the snaking tendrils creeping toward them. Again, the locomotive growled in displeasure.

  Marlowe’s device continued sparking bolts of green energy—diverting the locomotive’s power, as he’d explained. The engine coughed, and Harry felt a surge of hope that whatever was driving the train would be disabled. She watched Marlowe for his reaction—his gaze was grim, watchful. He did not seem optimistic.

  The entire train, engine and coal car, bucked, and Harry was sure they’d jumped the tracks and were about to crash—which in her estimation would be a good thing, given the alternative. But no, the vehicle had literally shivered, like a horse dislodging a fly. Marlowe’s spider came loose from its anchor, slipped off the train, in between the two cars and onto the tracks where it was surely smashed to pieces. The strange red glow from the firebox pulsed.

  “What now?” Harry breathed.

  “I don’t know.”

  That was worrying.

  The crawling tendrils were increasing in size—and speed. She fired at the front line again and again—then shouted at a pressure on her wrist, her off hand, which was gripping the railing at the end of the car. A tube made of some rubberized, flesh-like stuff coiled around her wrist. She fell back, yanking away, but the tube only squeezed more tightly. Bringing her pistol around, she aimed some distance away along the undulating thing and fired. The tube flinched—squeezing yet tighter—and a stray charge from the ray blast traveled up the tube and tingled through her arm. Shivering at the shock, she blinked, shook her head, and tried to figure out what to do about this. Her hand was numb, immobile.

  She slammed the butt of her pistol against a coil of tube lying against steel. No effect.

  Behind her, Marlowe grabbed hold of her. She leaned into him as far as she could, giving him room to reach around with a very sharp-looking tool, like forceps with probes on the end. He stabbed this into the tube a few inches from where it held her, and the probes let off arcs of green energy. The tube went limp, and Harry quickly scraped it off her hand. The whole length fell to drag behind them on the ground.

  “Are you all right?”

  She had to open and close her hands a few times to get feeling back. “Yes.”

  Ahead of the speeding train, a towering rock face loomed. “Marlowe, look!”

  This was the tunnel Cooper had mentioned, a place where blasting through the solid granite of the Rockies had been deemed easier than going around. As they watched, leaning out from the car, the stone unfolded.

  The tunnel would have looked normal to the riders who’d come to investigate. They’d have seen nothing wrong with the tracks, with the gaping mouth of the hole blown out of the mountainside or the rough granite within. But at the train’s approach, the stone changed, expanded, throwing out tendrils and wires, turning the stone into an alien maw. A match for the modified mechanics of the locomotive, the tunnel seemed designed to swallow the train.

  “We can’t let the train enter that tunnel,” Harry said.

  “There—that red light that keeps flashing from the firebox,” Marlowe said. “That’s what we want.”

  The light seemed to come from a specific point, a globe emitting the glare like a light bulb. It flashed every time they did something to the engine—every time they made it angry.

  “Do you have any idea how to accomplish this?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I would like to keep it intact if we can.”

  To study it, of course. Exactly their mission. “And how do we do that?”

  “We must get inside, of course.”

  She pursed her lips and considered. “Well. How about I create a distraction?” She looked around, found her footing. Hauling herself up, she braced one boot against a railing and the other against the top edge of the coal car, one of the few spaces not yet overrun with the writhing mechanism. But the tendrils were coming closer, climbing up the sides, stretching out with their eyeless certainty.

  Her balance on this perch was imperfect. In moments, she’d either be grabbed by the alien machine, or would be knocked off when the train came into contact with its partner at the tunnel.

  She aimed her pistol over the locomotive, around its chimney, to the undulating walls of the tunnel reaching out to her. Firing, she kept her finger on the trigger and swept a steady beam across the machinery. The massed coils shuddered, flinched—and continued reaching out.

  She spared a glance—Marlowe had taken to using brute force: a crowbar he’d stashed in his bag. He pried tubing out of his way, whacked at a bundle of wires writhing toward him, stabbed at an undifferentiated mass of machinery that had grown up over the coupling.

  Meanwhile, the train slowed. Coils of bronzed wires reached up from the rounded sides of the engine to join with the coils reaching down from the tunnel, and the two sets twisted together, pulling the locomotive to a gentle stop, like an airship coming to rest against its mooring platform. A mollusk folding into its shell. In this new incarnation, the locomotive was home.

  At the edge of the tunnel, the wire tendrils radiated from a central point, much as the locomotive’s adaptations grew from the firebox. That—that spot was key, and needed to be disabled as much as the light in the firebox did. She glanced at Marlowe’s progress; he was spending so much time battling the crawling mechanism, he had no chance to go after his target.

  They had to do something drastic soon, or they would be overwhelmed, swallowed up by that alien mouth, just as those who had come before them had been.

  “Marlowe—I’m going to try to give you an opening. Be ready!” Arms out for balance, she made her way along the edge of the coal car, from the untainted steel to the part of the train that had been overwhelmed with the Aetherian intrusion. Approaching the roof of the cab, she reached up and let a draping tentacle grab hold of her. Coiling around her left arm, writhing like a snake, it pulled her off her feet, raised her into the air.

  “Harry!” Marlowe called.

  “Go, just go!” she called back. He scrambled over the mound of gross mechanics and into the locomotive’s cab. Once he was under the roof, she could no longer see him. She turned her attention forward.

  She kept her other arm, the one holding the pistol, low and out from her body where she hoped it would not be bound up in the coils. The thing had hold of her body now, squeezing her legs and torso with a constant pressure. It wasn’t painful—as if it knew she was a living thing and had no wish to harm her. And yet it was drawing her inexorably upward, into its central maw.

  That was her target.

  This was a matter of timing: She had to maintain her range of motion and some semblance of calm when she reached that central point. But the number of tentacles locked on to her was increasing. Indeed, more seemed to come into being before her eyes. Soon, the thing would envelop her completely. She lunged.

  Using her very bonds as leverage, she thrust forward her right hand, stabbed her pistol as far into thing�
��s root as she could—the distance was considerable, more than she was expecting, because there was no central mass. The thing resembled a ball of yarn, threads coiled endlessly upon one another. The mass of threads pressed against her, seeking to immobilize her.

  While she still could, she fired the pistol in the beast’s heart.

  There was an explosion, and she fell.

  The tentacles all loosened at once, releasing her at the precise moment she was high in the air with nothing below to break her fall.

  The pistol was gone, destroyed. Hands free now, she grabbed one of the flailing tubes. It held, and she swung, smacked against the granite mouth of the tunnel—but it was just a tunnel now, with strange metallic vines hanging over the entrance. No longer a mouth. Her right arm ached—the blast from the gun and subsequent explosion had shredded her glove and the sleeve of her jacket. The fabric had only partially protected the skin underneath, which was pocked with cuts and bleeding.

  Below, the train had stopped. She still couldn’t see Marlowe in the cab. Hanging from her length of metal, she waited, watched for movement. Didn’t see any.

  “Marlowe!” she called. No answer. “Marlowe! James!”

  “Yes?” He emerged, straddling the coupling between cars, looking up at her. He had the crowbar and pliers in one hand, and something odd and alien in the other.

  She slumped, relieved, and lowered herself down the vine until she was resting on the roof of the cab. Here, too, the Aetherian appendages seem to have died in place. She pushed them away, and they dropped to the ground. “This is entirely bizarre,” she said.

  “Yes. What do you think of this?” He handed her the thing he was holding, the component from the firebox.

  It was hexagonal in shape, the size of her two hands together, and heavy. An intricate network of tiny wires ran across it in a mind-breaking geometric pattern. Given time, she might make sense of it, but at the moment it seemed a blur. She had trouble focusing on it.

  A reddish glow suffused the device, and several prongs around the outside of it were probably connectors. It was meant to be attached to something else. Somehow, it had made its way into the firebox and found a home there.