Fateful Lightning

by William R. Forstchen

  “No one knew,” Bullfinch replied, feeling a flush of anger at the impugning of the colonel’s honor. “No one, not Marcus, Kal, anyone. It had to be kept a secret, otherwise it would never have worked.”

  He wasn’t sure of the validity of what he had just said. After all, it might have been discussed. But he suspected that such a plot, which required such absolute security, would have been planned only by Andrew; and there was the other suspicion that the colonel would want such an action to be his responsibility and burden alone and no one else’s.

  Hamilcar gripped the side of the gunport, the iron still warm from the heat of day.

  “Would you care for a drink now, sir?” Bullfinch asked, his voice filled with concern.

  Hamilcar shook his head and looked over at one of his aides who waited out on the open deck.

  “Get the Suzdalian engine crew out of the ship and put our people who were observing them on duty. We’re leaving now.”

  Bullfinch, not understanding the exchange, waited until Hamilcar looked back at him.

  “The iron ship Antietam is now mine,” Hamilcar said quietly.

  “That ship belongs to the Suzdalian fleet,” Bullfinch snapped, his voice barely under control. “It was lent to you to help with the rescue of your people from your country.”

  “It’s mine now,” Hamilcar replied, his voice quiet but filled with a cold determination.

  “Sir, I cannot allow you to take one of my ships.”

  “Then stop me.”

  He stared straight into Bullfinch’s eyes, ready to pull the sword from his belt and take the young man’s head if he made the slightest move against him.

  “Sir, you can kill me—I know I wouldn’t stand a chance in a hand-to-hand fight against you—but I can’t allow you to take one of my ships.”

  The boy had courage, he had to grant him that.

  “We can fight, you and I. I could kill you here and most likely your men would shoot me before I got back to my ship,” Hamilcar replied. “You could even let me go and our ships could fight, but they are evenly matched and the spectacle would surely amuse the Merki. Either way, I am taking the ship.”

  “For what?”

  “To go back home,” Hamilcar said coldly. “Before this is all done, the Merki in their vengeance, or even the Bantag horde to the south, will drive the Cartha, perhaps all cattle of this world, into extinction. I am going home. Your war is now your war. I am finished with it.”

  “Forty thousand of your people are on our land for refuge,” Bullfinch replied hotly. “We gave you that even after you fought against us.”

  “Are you threatening them too?”

  Bullfinch sighed, shaking his head.

  “Our word is good. Colonel Keane offered you and your men sanctuary. He’ll honor that for them even if you desert.”

  Hamilcar nodded in reply.

  “At least you honor that. If you, if Keane honors his promise, if he does not send you and your ships to fight us, then I will not fight you. The Antietam will not be used against you if that promise is kept and I am allowed to go. But for this war, I am finished. I’m going home to save what I can.”

  Bullfinch looked at him appraisingly.

  “Take the ship. I won’t stop you,” he finally said, his voice barely a whisper.

  Hamilcar turned without comment, and ducking low started to climb through the gunport.

  “But don’t expect help from us after this,” Bullfinch said, his anger returning.

  Hamilcar paused and looked back at him.

  “I never wanted it to start with,” he said coldly, and disappeared from view.

  Chapter 2

  Running alongside the engine, Chuck Ferguson grabbed hold of the ladder, then pulled himself up. His legs dangled for a moment, just inches from the spinning wheels of the locomotive. He put his foot into the bottom rung of the ladder and clambered aboard the cab. The engineer, an old Suzdalian who looked every inch a railroad man, complete to oil-stained coveralls and peaked cap, gazed over at the young inventor and shook his head.

  “Nice way to lose your legs if you slip,” the engineer said calmly, while motioning for his fireman to tap off some hot water for a cup of tea.

  The sound of the roadbed shifted into a hollow rumble as the engine crossed the bridge spanning the Sangros. Taking the scalding cup of tea, Chuck leaned out of the cab, looking down to the riverbed thirty feet below. From upstream a delivery of rough-cut lumber, piled high on open rafts, floated with the late-spring current, the rivermen riding atop their cargo, boating poles in hand, working to maneuver the long string of rafts over toward the east shore of the river. A gang of laborers lined the bank, just finishing up with an earlier load, hoisting the lumber off the rafts to pile it aboard a string of old narrow-gauge flatcars, which were pulled by oxen on a hastily laid track that gradually cut up the side of the embankment. Coming up out of the riverbed, the track turned east and ran across the open fields to the far side of Hispania, where a vast city of rough shelters was going up overnight to house the ten thousand workers and their families who were moving in with the arriving factories. The uncut lumber that made up the rafts would be snaked up the bank later and used for field fortifications.

  “Andre Ilyavich, isn’t it?”

  The engineer grinned and nodded.

  “Is this the train carrying the rifle factory?” Chuck asked.

  “The same.”

  Chuck nodded, tasting the tea and smiling a thanks as the fireman, with dirt-blackened hands, offered him a slice of bread covered in cheese.

  The bread was fresh-baked, the cheese soft, tasty. He wanted to ask where they had landed such a delicacy, but decided it was best not to inquire. It was always best not to ask too many questions. He looked back into the tender car, and there sitting in the wood-pile was a Rus family, grandparents, mother, and five children.

  Food most likely traded for a train ride out, a fair exchange for both sides, he had to reason.

  “My sister-in-law and her children and parents,” the fireman said almost apologetically.

  Civilian refugees were not supposed to ride aboard the engine and tender, but the rule was generally ignored.

  “It’s all right,” Chuck said, and the fireman smiled with relief.

  “Where’s her husband, your brother I take it?”

  “With the 1st Vazima, Homula’s regiment, Second Corps. He was with the rear guard at the Ford.”

  “Did he get out?”

  “Last we heard he was all right—slightly wounded, but nothing serious.”

  “Can she cook?”

  “Wonderfully,” the fireman said, motioning for her to come forward.

  He didn’t want to hear yet another story. Everyone had a story, ready to say anything if it meant a chance to escape into Roum territory aboard a train. He smiled at her and held up his hand for her not to speak, while she eyed him nervously, as if he might somehow send her all the way back to Kev for breaking the rules. Reaching into his vest pocket, he pulled out an order pad and jotted off a quick note. Tearing the sheet of paper out, he gave it to her.

  “This is a pass for you and your family to stay on this train. You and your mother are being hired as cooks at a factory going up farther up the line. Your father can work in the factory, so just stay in this cab till your brother here tells you to get off.”

  The woman started to blurt out her thanks, and wearily he patted her on the shoulder and then turned away as if she no longer existed.

  The fireman started to pour out his thanks as well, but he waved the man off and went to look back out of the cab. Though John Mina as chief of logistics might view the train line as his own, Chuck Ferguson felt that since he had invented it all, it was his, and he had to look out for his own people. The man wouldn’t forget the favor, and he was going to need all the gratitude he could summon, and quite a bit of judicious forgetting on the part of some, in the next couple of weeks.

  “But this train is supposed to
turn around here at Hispania and go straight back to Kev,” Andre said, looking over at Chuck, sensing something out of line in his last comment.

  “A little side trip,” Chuck said, trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice.

  “It’ll play hell with the schedule.”

  “I’ll take responsibility for that.”

  “General Mina’s people aren’t going to like it. This train’s due back in Kev at she forty-five tomorrow morning.”

  “I said I’ll take care of it,” Chuck said sharply.

  The engineer, knowing better than to argue the point, turned away.

  The train, having crossed the Sangros, was now into Roum territory, and they drifted past the border marker, adorned with the eagle and fasces of the newly formed Republic. A switchman in the loose-fitting tunic of a Roum peasant, who most likely a year ago had been a slave laboring in the fields, stood by the switch holding up a pole, atop which was affixed a board painted green, the signal that the switch was clear.

  The train turned off the main line. The beginnings of a heavy bastion were going up to the left, and the back of the train station was on the right. Hispania Station was crowded with hundreds of refugees who had been dropped off earlier in the day and were now waiting for the train to come up from Roum and take them on the last leg of their journey into the city.

  A long table of rough-hewn planks was set up by the mud-brick-and-limestone building. Half a dozen simmering caldrons were behind the table, tended by a crowd of chattering women, some Rus, others Roum, and what looked like a couple of Cartha. The mix of languages didn’t seem to stop them in their conversations. Beside the caldrons was a small mountain of what appeared to be potatoes, or what passed for potatoes on this world, along with the butchered remains of what he suspected was an antelope. The refugees were lined up, patiently waiting their turn.

  He had heard of the breakdown of order at a couple of places, riots to grab food. But remarkably, discipline was still holding at the rail stations. He suspected that in large part a thousand years of subservience, of following orders, even when it meant walking into the slaughter pits, had bred a resignation to privation, which at least in this situation was to everyone’s advantage. Social order could too easily break down under the stress of the evacuation and the next wave of the war. If that started, they were all doomed. It was essential to get the factories up and running, the army dug in, and the remaining hundreds of thousands working in the fields and woods if they were to win this war, and beyond that have any hope of surviving the next winter. Bob Fletcher, head of food organization, struck Chuck as being something of a mad idealist, already planning out food supply a year in the future.

  In twenty days the Merki move again, Chuck thought. They could be here inside of a month and a half, just around midsummer day. He forced the thought away as the train drifted past the food line and the scent of the stew wafted up to him.

  When was the last time he had managed to down a hot meal? He looked at the caldrons longingly. One of the women turned to look up at him, and he felt as if his heart would skip a beat. It was Olivia, Julius’s daughter. Now just what the hell was she doing here? Their gaze held for a second.

  He had not seen her in weeks, not since the day she and her father had joined him for a tour of the aerosteamer works—on the day word had come that the Merki were moving at last. She had barely been out of his nighttime thoughts since. She smiled at him, and then he truly felt his heart skip a beat.

  She remembers me! The train drifted on, and he was tempted to jump off. He looked over at Andre, who had seen the exchange and was smiling.

  “Friend of yours?” the engineer asked.

  “I guess she is,” Chuck said shyly.

  “A real beauty, that one,” and the old man chuckled in a way that Chuck didn’t much care for.

  Chuck gave the man a cold stare, and the engineer, clearing his throat, looked away.

  The locomotive continued on, rolling past the back of the station, which was piled to near roof level with rough-cut crossties and shiny rails. Several refugee families had arranged some of the ties into temporary shelters, and they looked up forlornly as the engine drifted by.

  The mud-brick-and-limestone walls of old Hispania were now to the left, on a low rise of ground a couple of hundred yards away. Three years before, the small city had been the westernmost outpost of Roum territory, a provincial town on the edge of the Great Forest, a sleepy outpost where the wealthy families of Roum would come to escape the summer heat and to take sulfur baths, near where the powder works and a small mine produced the now precious quicksilver to supply the army’s fulminate of mercury for percussion caps. Their villas were mostly south of the town, down in the half-moon-shaped valley below, where the soil was rich and some of the best wine grapes in all of Roum were cultivated.

  The war had changed all that. He had always found it fascinating how simple factors of geography, geology, and random chance could take a town or village and in time of war make it the nexus point of the conflict. It had started when the rail line first crossed here into Roum territory and it was decided that this would be the location of a rail maintenance yard. That had brought in a thousand workers. A new town had sprung up overnight outside the walls of the city, the rail yard, engine shed, forges, warehouses, and workers’ huts surrounded by an earthen wall. This was the first place that Rus and Roum culture had truly intermingled. Rus architecture was evident in the new town of log homes, adorned with the usual wood carvings and brightly colored doors, shutters, and roofs. The rapid expansion of the quicksilver mine, processing plant, and mill for turning out percussion caps had created another overnight town on the north side of the city, most of the workers in this new industry the newly freed Roum.

  Twenty miles to the north, up in the forest, was the powder mill, located near the sulfur springs, and just east of it the aerosteamer works, both of them built in the forest to hide them from Merki airships. Another new town had gone up around these factories overnight, twelve hundred workers and their families living in the forests. And two miles east of the aerosteamer factory was yet another project, one that only Chuck and a small number of his confederates were fully aware of.

  The language spoken in Hispania was now something of a strange polyglot of old Rus, English technical terminology, and the curious vulgar Latin of Roum. Gates, the newspaper editor, had even published an article in his weekly illustrated about how the languages might eventually blend into the common speech of commerce, the railroads, and diplomacy. Andrew had given Gates’s newspaper a high priority for evacuation, believing it to be essential for morale purposes. Gates already had his press up and publishing in an office in the old part of Hispania.

  The naval war of the previous year and the mad rush to relieve Roum had made this town the central supply depot of the army during that campaign, and from it the rebuilding of the destroyed rail lines had been directed after the defeat of the traitorous Cromwell. More warehouses, more cabins had gone up. Then the spur line was run north, into the forest to the new powder mill and aerosteamer yard, and the sawmills for turning out prefabricated parts for bridges and for crossties and now the lumber to build yet more factories and warehouses. More sidings had gone in, and yet more laborers, mainly former Roum slaves, had come to learn their new skills and to live here.

  Now if only Bill Webster and his capitalist friends had been allowed to invest in real estate here, he thought with a smile, they’d have made a killing. But in this emergency, real estate dealings be damned, the land had simply been confiscated from the senators who had rebelled against Marcus.

  And now the new emergency. Some of the factories—the cannon works, the iron, steel, bronze, and zinc foundries, the lead-processing plant, and the rail works—were being shipped to Roum, where ore and coke supplies were still available, and were easily moved to the capital city by ship from farther down the Roum coast. The rifle and musket works, the wheelwright and gun carriage shops, and the wi
re works for telegraph lines were going up here in Hispania. Ore and fuel supplies necessitated setting up the cannon works in Roum. Supplies of wood for weapon stocks, the location of lumber for housing and factories, and the fact that it was a major rail terminal argued for locating most of the other factories in Hispania. The one great drawback was power for the factories. If there had been enough time they could have dammed off the Sangros and Tiber, but that was out of the question. The only alternative was to cannibalize the rail engines yet again.

  My precious engines, he thought sadly. They had been made to ride the rails, not to be stripped down and hooked into bellows, forges, trip-hammers, and lathes. It was a precarious balancing act—they needed every engine they had for the evacuation and for the coming battles, yet they needed new weapons as well. More than one of the locomotives had started out on the rails, then been converted to an ironclad engine, then back to rail, and now had become a power plant for a factory. John Mina had decided to keep thirty locomotives for the rail line, use another twenty-eight for the factories, and leave the remaining six, all the old engines from the first narrow-gauge line, as a reserve to be shifted either way as needed. The fifteen others they had made on this world were now either in the ironclads or on the bottom of the sea, and one, taken by the traitor Hinsen, was somewhere far to the south, in enemy hands.

  He looked affectionately around the cab. Even in the rush of emergency building, the Rus had taken the time to add little affectionate details. The wooden handle to the whistle was carved in the rough likeness of a bear’s head, and the engineer’s side of the cab had a primitive icon of Kevin Malady set into the woodwork. Malady had become something like a patron saint of the railroad men.

  Chuck smiled as he looked at the picture. Malady had been one of the old veterans of the 35th, a railroad man before the war and the first engineer of the line when the old Maine, Fort Lincoln, and Suzdal Railroad had opened with the first narrow-gauge line, even before the Tugars had come. On the day the Tugars had broken into the city he had smashed the safety valves and driven his engine straight into the enemy host. He and Hawthorne were the first to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. And now he was a saint. It was hard to imagine hard-swearing, hard-fighting Malady as a saint wearing a halo, but somehow his toughness suited these men who ran the rail lines. He raised his cup of tea in a quiet salute to the memory of an old friend, gone now like so many others.