She looked around the captive faces.
“I agree with my friend, Child’a’grace, that Taal Chordant would only have used the emergency communication system on another’s behalf, and I feel the loss of young Sweetness Octave as deeply as any of you, but consider again those words ‘economic well-being.’ Sweetness Octave had a choice. She made it, she left the train. Such is her right. But her choice took away our choice. We live with the economic and social consequences of her exercise of freedom. I don’t need to regale you with the economic implications of marriage contracts—we all have our diverse nuptial customs—let alone the social. Suffice to say what you have all by now experienced: that the real damage was done to the name of Catherine of Tharsis, and that name is our economic well-being. We are Catherine of Tharsis, four centuries of history beneath her wheels, named after Our Blessed Lady herself. We should be heading up the Ares Express. There should be Prelates and Nabobs in our Excelsior class lounges, not half a forest and a festering factory full of bugs. But it is work—the only work we can get. Oh yes. I won’t bore you with how hard I and my family argued to get even this. So low has our stock sunk. So low. But it’s money. It pays the track fees and the water rates and the insurance and the mortgage and puts a little food in our mouths. It’s economic well-being. And now, you would throw every deadline and timetable and delivery date down the jakes for the person—mark this well—who got us into this state in the first place. Not enough for her to do it once. She would have you do it again. She doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Whatever you’re doing, I don’t care, stop it. Come and get me. I’ve had enough. I’m bored with life out there. I want to come back. Remember, she chose to leave us. She chose to walk away without a thought; without a thought for us, and now she wants to walk back again.”
Marya Stuard looked long at the sombre faces around the table. She had given them the back of her hand, the hard slapping of truth. Time now for the drop of honey. The table would be hers.
“I’m not saying, leave her,” Marya Stuard said, and could almost hear the tension go out of her audience’s muscles like a chemical sigh. She afforded a little smile. “What I am saying is just, not now. When we’ve delivered. When we’ve our next contract, then, and she’ll always be welcome back among us—we are one nation on a rail. But not now. Not now.”
She stood, feeding on the ringing applause.
“There, I think that has it sorted,” she asided to Naon Engineer. It did seem so. The mutineer running dogs were dismayed, Romereaux silently seething, but Child’a’grace sat preternaturally calm. Marya Stuard felt her scalp prickle, a wash of magnetism, a subtle charisma from the Engineer woman that slowly but surely suffused the room like incense and turned every head to her.
“You’re not a mother, are you?”
There was a collective gasp. It was an unspeakably low blow, it was the knife in the belly, the mallet to the testicles, the Sunday punch from which there is no coming back, the all-conquering Belly Spear which can never be used with honour. Because every sinning soul aboard Catherine of Tharsis knew it was true. Marya Stuard staggered, her assurance annihilated, the wind gone out of her, the fusion fires doused. She wavered. She paled. She passed her hand over her face.
She looked faint, confused, for the first time without a riposte ready to hand. Things no one in that council chamber had ever seen before and no one could rightly believe they were seeing now. She toppled, went down in her seat, fatally punctured, mouth opening and closing like a beached cod, but Child’a’grace was relentless. The long chapatti years were speaking. She turned on Naon Sextus Asiim Engineer 11th.
“And you, the flesh of your flesh and the blood of your blood, the seed of your seed and the dream of your dreams? You a father, not dry and seedless like this, this stick, this thorn, and you no different? Dollars and centavos. Dollars and centavos. The nation, the train, the nation, the train. Catherine of Tharsis is her people, her wealth is here, all of the people in this chamber, not what we haul behind us for others like sledge dogs. Our wealth is our people, all our people, and if one of us is missing, we are the poorer, we are impoverished, and for us to willingly sell of our own, for dollars and centavos, for security, we are lost. We are bankrupt. We deserve to steam no more. We deserve to go under the hammers at the Winter Solstice auction and take up hoes and desk jobs.”
Face like fusion reheat, Naon Sextus was on his feet. Every mouth was a round “O” of astonishment.
“Woman, you go too far! You drive me too far, too far. You are not track, not in the blood, you know nothing, nothing, you…you…Susquavanna, you Platform.”
The silence was absolute, the shock palpable. Not at what Naon had said, terrible though it was. It was what—who—he had said it to. To his wife. Directly. Passionately. Face to face.
Child’a’grace filled the stunned vacuum with action.
“With me, now!” she cried, leaped up from the conference table and was out through the carriage door. In a thought, Romereaux was after her, then, in order of fleetness, Thwayte Engineer, his sister Anhinga, Psalli, Ricardo and Miriamme Traction and Mercedes Deep-Fusion of the asbestos gloves and the impudent calliope.
“Quick quick quick,” Romereaux shouted, beckoning them through as Naon Engineer rose from his stupor with the terrible cry of “Mutiny!” on his lips and Sle and Rother’am at the head of the mob leaped for the hatch like hunting dogs. Romereaux slammed and dogged it in their faces. It would buy seconds, that was all. Seconds were all he needed. Tante Mercedes’s steatopygous rear was vanishing up the water tender companionway, already Sle and Rother’am were cranking away at the manual override and one of the six dogs was free. Romereaux punched his personal code into the emergency carriage release mechanism. The Engineer brothers saw what he intended and redoubled their efforts. Naon joined them, face pressed sideways into the porthole. Over the clacket of the wheels, Romereaux heard the repeated cry of “Mutiny, mutiny.” Two dogs were free, three dogs. The keypad spat out Romereaux’s authorisation with a curt “code not recognised.” Romereaux cursed exotically and reentered the code, willing his fingers to be slow, steady, patient. Four dogs free, five. So slow. The sixth and final dog was beginning to unwind. Was halfway unthreaded. Was three-quarters unthreaded.
“Code accepted,” the key pad reported. A square yellow button lit up. Romereaux hit it as the sixth and final dog hit the deck, the door scissored open, Rother’am and Sle dived and the explosive bolts in the carriage couplings blew. For an instant Rother’am and Sle hung suspended. Then it was as if they were being drawn slowly back while still in midleap as clear blue sky appeared between the carriages and the rear section of the train began to slow under its gargantuan weight.
Romereaux wiggled his fingers at the receding loyalists as Catherine of Tharsis, unencumbered, found unheard-of speeds. A last cry of “Mutiny!” penetrated the shriek of wind and steam and was gone.
Romereaux arrived on a crowded bridge. Catherine of Tharsis pounded at four hundred and twenty down the beautiful straight steel line.
“Excuse me,” he asked, “but who’s driving the train?”