“It’s asking if we want to switch direction,” Mal said.
“The points are set for straight ahead, but left looks southbound to me. Let’s take it.” Reston jabbed the button beside the light. A segment of the track slid ponderously leftward, and the train, complaining, transferred onto the new course. “Hope that was right decision.”
Tlanextic’s train also made the interchange, much more smoothly, and Mal could see that it was gaining on theirs, incrementally but remorselessly. She could see on the Serpent Warriors’ faces — Tlanextic’s in particular — a growing sense of triumph. They were holding fire with their l-guns, but only because they were waiting for the moment when her and Reston’s train became an unmissable, point-blank target. It wouldn’t be long now.
She had to slow the Serpents down somehow, if possible stop them altogether.
The displaced bank of seats gave her an idea. She made her way along the train to them.
“What are you doing?” Reston wanted to know.
“Trying to help. Just keep driving.”
The seats had been wrenched almost completely free from their mounting. Only a couple of screws still moored them in place. One of the screws was sheared nearly all the way through and Mal was able to snap it with a good, hard kick. The other, however, was more or less intact. She didn’t have a screwdriver on her but she did have her trusty macuahitl. She inserted the edge of the blade under the screw’s head and began levering. She squatted down and gave it all she’d got, heaving on the sword handle, using every ounce of strength in her shoulders and thighs. It seemed that the screw would never budge. Her muscles would give, or her macuahitl would, before it did.
Then there was an abrupt sharp creak of progress. The screw squeezed up a few millimetres from its socket, and the seats jiggled that little bit more freely. Encouraged, Mal redoubled her efforts.
“Get a move on, Vaughn,” Reston said. He could see what she was up to but also how close the Serpents were getting. “Put your back into it.”
“Could you…” Mal gasped through clenched teeth, “kindly… just do your thing… and leave me… the fuck alone… to do mine?”
At last, with a sudden grinding surrender, the screw came out. The bank of seats stood rattling loose on the floor of the train.
Mal had been intending to pick up the seats and lob them at the train behind with as much accuracy as she could manage. At the very least the sight of a bank of seats hurtling towards him would cause the driver to apply the brakes, and if she got lucky the thing might get jammed between train and rail, forcing the Serpents to halt, maybe even causing a crash.
Just then, however, one of the Serpents chose to fire an exploratory shot, to see if the fugitives’ train was near enough yet. It wasn’t. The bolt fell short. But only by a foot or so. A few more seconds and even that slender margin of safety would be eroded.
There wasn’t time for anything elegant. Mal settled for booting the seats off the back of the train.
They cartwheeled down the track towards the oncoming Serpents. Tlanextic yelled out a warning and everybody ducked. The seats failed to become wedged beneath the train; instead, they collided with the windshield, which shattered in a sparkling shower of glass shards that sprayed over the five Serpents and the driver. The seats then spun on past the train, landing behind and careering off, a mangle of tubular steel and plastic padding, through the windows of an adjacent tower.
“Nice try,” Reston commented.
“Worth a shot,” Mal said, as the driver of the other train popped his head up again and so did the Serpent Warriors, all of them shaking glass fragments out of their clothes.
“Uh-oh,” Reston then said.
“Oh, what now?”
“Look.”
“Bugger.”
Dead ahead, there was a third train. It was trundling along at a leisurely pace, empty apart from a driver who seemed in no hurry to get anywhere and was blissfully unaware of the two trains barrelling up from behind. He was just idling along from platform to platform like a cabbie cruising for his next fare.
“Does this thing have a horn?” Reston said.
“Racket we’re making, it’s a wonder he hasn’t heard us already,” said Mal. “Oi!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Dickhead! Shift yourself! Unless you want to get rammed.”
The driver in front turned and his eyes went saucer wide. He scrabbled to push the throttle forward, and his train started to speed up.
Their train was still zeroing in on his, though, and fast. Reston didn’t dare ease off, not with the Serpents breathing down their necks. A shunt was unavoidable.
“Brace yourself,” he told Mal.
Their train rear-ended the one in front. At that point, Newtonian physics took over. The front train, boosted from behind, jetted forward at even greater speed. The driver let out a squawk of terror, clinging to his control console for dear life.
Mal and Reston’s train, meanwhile, its nose now a crumpled mess, was brought almost to a standstill by the impact. The Serpent train continued rocketing towards it as rapidly as ever. The driver of the latter hit the brakes, but there wasn’t enough time.
“Jump for it,” said Reston.
Mal was already jumping for it.
Both she and Reston threw themselves clear of the train a heartbeat before the Serpent train ploughed into it. The Serpent train rose off the track and mounted theirs, with a godawful cacophony of metal crunching and men screaming in panic. The two vehicles, conjoined, went scraping on down the track, parts flying off, sparks shooting everywhere like a firework display. One of the Serpent Warriors was jettisoned from his seat and flung like a ragdoll headfirst to the track bed, breaking his neck. The others, and the driver, just hung on helplessly as the violent, slewing ride ran its course. Friction and inertia eventually brought the locked-together trains to a halt some five hundred yards further down the line. They settled at an ungainly angle on the rail, silent and spent, like a pair of old drunkards after an uproarious bender. Everyone still aboard was too shaken up to do much but groan and give thanks that they were alive. The antigrav-particle exciters on these trains were well-reinforced, but even so it was a small miracle that neither one of them had been breached.
By the time Colonel Tlanextic got himself together to clamber out and head back along the track to look for the two English fugitives, they were long gone.
His wrath was terrible to behold. And exceptionally loud. Proceeding on the assumption that Mal and Reston were still within earshot, which they were, he informed them that this was his island, his domain. It was swarming with Serpent Warriors. They could run but they wouldn’t get far.
“You’re mine,” he roared. “I’ll find you. I’ll find you and fucking slaughter you. It’s only a matter of time.”
TWENTY-SIX
Same Day
Stuart was feeling more like his old self than he had in weeks. Since leaving England, in fact. He was in desperate trouble, he knew. He and Vaughn were on the run in Tenochtitlan. Tenochtitlan! They were fugitives marked for death in the Great Speaker’s own redoubt, a city teeming with highly trained, dedicated and ruthless soldiers. Colonel Tlanextic’s next move would surely be to put out an all-points bulletin with their descriptions. Every Serpent Warrior under his command would be on the lookout for a white male and white female, both in their early to mid-thirties, one armed with a macuahitl. As things stood, their chances of reaching the harbour without being spotted, challenged, shot at and captured were next to nil. And in the unlikely event that they did make it, it was far from guaranteed that they’d be able to get themselves a ride on a boat. All in all, their prospects were bleak.
But even as he and Vaughn raced to put distance between them and the monorail track, Stuart felt positive. Alive. Hopeful, even. The more so as Tlanextic’s bellowed threats reached his ears.