The captain said nothing. She pressed a button on the box she held, & read the lights. The scanner in her hand traced the sub-dirt passage of her nemesis. It sent back information from the tracer she had shot into the giant mole’s flesh.
FORTY-SIX
THESE WERE THE RAILSEA’S MIDDLE REACHES: NOT yet the deepest open rail, far from hardland, nor the bays & heavily patrolled inlets & railrivers of territorial stretches. The lines & the train upon them wound through stunted hardy forests.
“Ooh ooh,” said Dero. He steered the Shroake train a good decent distance from the barricaded buildings of some tiny rock-perching hamlet, peered again through his lever-side windows at the community of small simians that watched him from the trees. He tried, once more, to imitate them. “Eeh eeh,” he said. He jumped up & down.
The monkey family watched the train go, prim & glum. The older female sniffed & peed. The others wandered off, on their branches, hand over hand.
“Tchah,” said Dero. “Stupid animals,” he said. “Ain’t they?”
“Whatever you say,” Caldera said. She was writing in the Shroake train journal & log.
“Come on, Cal. This is supposed to be fun.”
“Fun?” she said slowly. She put the book down. “Fun? You know where we’re heading? Course you don’t. Neither do I. That’s the whole point. But you know this ain’t going to be a joke. This is a promise we’re making, that’s what. For them. So let me ask you again—you think it’s supposed to be fun?”
She stared at her brother. He met her gaze. He was littler than her, by a good ways, but he stuck out his chin & furrowed his brow & said, “Yeah. A bit.”
& after a second, Caldera slumped & sighed, & said, “Yeah. I suppose it should be a bit. Tell you what.” She glanced in the direction of the copse they had left. “Next one we pass, we’ll throw fruit at the monkeys.”
ANOTHER CHARACTERISTIC of these inner-outer stretches—given the reefs of rock, fields of scattered salvage disproportionately jagged with metal, the trees & narrow straits between hardland islands—was that they were dangerous. Look to your charts, drivers. & it was so much more dangerous if you were determined to roll at night.
The Shroakes were determined to roll at night. Their instruments on, they sat in a winking cave of diodes as their train progressed. It was dimmer even than usual that starless evening, but for the soundless sweeps of far-off white beams from another light-tower ahead.
“Careful here,” Caldera muttered to herself, checked the chart that warned of dangerous proximity of the rails to rockfalls & quicksand.
“Drattit,” she murmured, slowing & backing up. “I’m taking us that way,” she said. “That must be the Safehouse Good Beacon.” She checked her chart again. “So if we go this route …”
She worked her remote control on switches & picked them slowly towards the lighthouse. The wheels whispered on the iron. The light fluttered with tiny shadows, as night-birds & darkbats bickered in its beam for hunting rights.
“Where is it we are?” Dero said. Caldera pointed at the map. Dero frowned. “Really?” he said.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Caldera said. She gritted her teeth & wrestled with the controls. “I know, I know, from the direction of the line, you’d have thought we were closer north a bit, right? Well.” They rumbled over unsteady ground. “Well, these aren’t the most up-to-date charts. They must be wrong.”
“If you say so,” Dero said doubtfully. “I mean …” He squinted into the night.
“Well, there’s not much else it can be, is there?” Caldera said. She adjusted, switched. “I mean look at the lighthouse. They ain’t going to have built a new one, are they?”
But of course by the time that last word was out of her mouth, Caldera had answered her own question in her head. Dero was staring at her, uncomprehending but horrified by her look. Glinting outside took his attention. Glinting much too close. “There’s something,” he said, “on that beach.”
“Stop!” Caldera shouted. Hauled hard, hard on the brake, & the train’s wheels screamed in resentment as it grudgingly halted. Dero staggered & fell. “Back back back!” Caldera shouted.
“What are you …?”
“Check the rear!” Above them the light beam went by. The train slowly began to move again, backed up, away from one bit of darkness among many.
“What am I looking for?” Dero said.
“Anything behind us.”
“There ain’t nothing.”
“Perfect then!” Caldera said, & accelerated in reverse. “Keep watching! We’ll turn around when we can.”
& with a lurch of the retreating train, the vivid glare of its headlamp swung a few yards, & Caldera saw how close to either side of the route they’d been taking were rises of flint. She had been a breath away from steering her train into a pass. On the edges of which, overlooking them, poised with great rocks ready to roll in to derail her, silent figures watched.
She caught her breath. She bit her lip. Another light swing showed the pale faces of the ambushers. They stared at her retreating vehicle, stared right through the glass, through the cameras & at her.
Calm-faced men & women. Armed. Carrying tools, the equipment with which to take an errant train apart. They lay where they had been hiding, their expressions betraying no shame nor any aggression: only mild disappointment as their prey escaped.
“Of course someone built a new lighthouse,” Caldera whispered.
“What’s that?” Dero said. “I can’t hear you. What is going on, anyway?”
What was going on? People had smashed the lights of the real & automated tower, that must, Caldera thought, be standing to useless dark attention on a nearby beach, not at all where she thought she had seen it. Locals had by careful reference to railsea charts lit a fake beacon at a place chosen to appeal as a reference in the darkest nights, that would lure the unlucky in to a terrible impassable part of the rails, where the crews who had built that false light would be waiting, to do what was necessary to travellers, to scavenge the scrap their intervention left behind. The cruellest kind of salvage. Train-ghouls, derailers & thieves.
“Wreckers,” Caldera whispered.
FORTY-SEVEN
A RED SIGNAL AT THIS JUNCTION OF THE STORY-TRAIN’S route.
Generations of thinkers have stood with notebooks open on coastlines, the endless spread of ties-&-iron before them—countless junctions, switches, possibilities in all directions—& insisted that what characterises rails is that they have no terminus. No schedule, no end, no direction. This has become common sense. This is a cliché.
Every rail demands consideration of every other, & all the branches onto which that other rail might switch. There are those who would issue orders, & would control the passage of all such narratives. They may, from time to time, even be able to assert authority. They will not, however, always be successful. One could consider history an unending brawl between such planners, & others who take vehicles down byways.
So, now. The signal demands the story stop. With diesel wheeze & wheel complaint, our train reverses. With a whack of trainhooks a story-switch is thrown, & our text proceeds again from days ago, from where it had got to. To answer a question bellowed, we might imagine, by moldywarpe critics as we took routes where the Siblings Shroake drove & the Medes hunted. Curious & impatient mole listeners raised heads from earth & shouted across the flatlands of untold things. Demanding attentions elsewhere.