Railsea

“You said you’d been going slow deliberately,” Dero said.

“I was lying.”

“I thought you was lying.”

They knew how to make the Shroake train go when it was in the mood to work, but not to tweak somethings wrong in the strange metal hearts & tubes their parents had built. The vehicle sputtered at pitiful speed.

“So what,” Dero said, “d’you propose we do?”

Caldera leaned out of the window. “You know,” she said at last, with rising excitement. “I don’t know that they’ve actually seen us. Look at how they’re switching. They know we’re round here somewhere, but …”

She steered with renewed energy. Took them over points that veered lines close to a looming cliff. Thickly, richly vegetational. Their long journey had already sprayed their train’s flanks with dirt & dust. “Right,” Caldera said. She slowed them yet slower, & stopped the train in the shadows. “Quick,” she said. Climbed out of the roof hatch, & with hook & hands snatched plant matter from the overhangs. Dero did the same, until they stood under a wodge of richly smelling sappy green stuff. They draped their vehicle in the creepers.

“This is a rubbish plan,” Dero said, as they crawled back inside.

“I await your improvements eagerly. & complaining is awesomely helpful.”

Up close, the Shroake train was an absurd, green-pelted, unconvincing thing. But perhaps, in the stark light contrasts of the railsea, over miles, at motion, their poor battered conveyance might pass for some ignorable viney nothing. Dero & Caldera waited. They watched the incoming train through dirty glass & now, too, from behind a green fringe.

“Always knew Mum & Dads had annoyed them,” Dero said. He & Caldera held hands. They waited. The naval train came closer. It approached, closer, closer, it was abreast of them, only a few rail-widths away.

It passed on again. At last, the Siblings Shroake breathed out.

“This thing is barely even going,” Dero said at last. He kicked the inside of the carriage. “What are we going to do?”

“They’re going to find us again, you know,” Caldera said. “I just don’t think we can get by them. They probably will.”

“Yeah,” said Dero. For just a sad & terrible second, he looked like he would cry. “So what we going to do?”

“What can we do?” Caldera said at last. “Keep trying. Do our best.”

She shrugged. After a minute, her brother shrugged, too.

SEVENTY-TWO

THE DETAILS ARE DISTINCT, THE SPECIFICS SPECIFIC, but the trend clear. Event, encounter, pushing on, the slow degradation of the Shroake train, an against-the-odds continuation. That is what has been.

The train is such a battered shade of itself. But this is the railsea. A greater surprise is surely that the Shroakes are still here at all.

What Dero would admit to, who can say? But Caldera, certainly, is astonished.

“WELL YOU’VE DONE IT NOW!” Caldera didn’t even know who she was talking to anymore.

It was the purest & most undeserved luck that the Manihiki train had not wheeled round, come back & found them. Someone else, however, was after them.

The Shroake train, coaxed to a last life lease, was hauling rail to rail. There was no hiding now. Nothing in this outermost railsea—not landscape, fauna, flora, the rails themselves—behaved as it ought. They passed bridges from & to nowhere, that doubled back at the apex of their curves; lines that spiralled into sinkholes. Birds much bigger than they should be, perhaps a little too limb-encumbered, flew high enough to tickle the upsky.

“Maybe,” Dero whispered, “out here all the lines are blurry, & maybe birds in the sky & really bad things in the upsky are making babies.”

Caldera & Dero pored over charts & teased their dead parents fondly for their scrawls. They configured plans. They blinked too much & missed food. Dero snapped at Caldera & Caldera said less & less, sometimes nothing for hours.

Now here came a train, racing for them with clear intent. “You’ve done it now!” Caldera repeated. Local brigands, she thought, a ferocious compact battletrain from insular nearby islands full, myth had it, of monstrosities & prodigies, trains that ran backwards through time. & who, it seemed, had either heard of the Shroakes, or greeted all incomers in so pugnacious a fashion.

“You’ve been & gone & done it now!” Caldera shouted, & shoved forward the levers, which did nothing anymore.

Once they would have outrun such an enemy without bothering to break off from sandwiches & backgammon. Now their locomotive wheezed & lurched like a moribund mule. Dero switched & the pursuers gained. Their diesel growl grew louder.

A last push, another throttle. Caldera held her breath.

She heard a cannon fire. She closed her eyes. But nothing hit them. The train drummed under a rain of earth.

“Cal,” Dero said.

A fusillade of missiles was slamming into the attack-train on their tail. Rocks, arrows, small-arms fire. Nothing devastating, but enough to mess with, to confound & hurt the wildland attackers, who scrambled to turn their weapons towards this new threat.

Windblown carts! Switching & track-riding with skills a delight to see; tacking in gusts from line to line; firing catapults, slingshots, crossbows, pistols; in & out again. & here, bearing down by its sailing companions, on the brigand-train switching lines, came a moletrain. A moletrain, miles, miles & miles from any moldywarpe runs.

The sailing carriages scattered, firing as they went. The moler came in fast. Its harpoon guns were levelled. It faced the attacker, on the same track, heading straight for them. Caldera shook her head. “What are they doing?” she whispered. Even a moler in top shape was no match for these local warlords. Thanks very much for saving us, Caldera thought. I wish you weren’t about to die. She counted down seconds till impact. Ten, she thought. Nine. Eight.

But no: it was a well-judged challenge. The brigands flinched. A switch & they were slaloming out of the moler’s path. To where ground suddenly jumped like an animal provoked.

Up came a grinding machine. Breaching all manner of railsea taboos, a subterrain smashed through the ties themselves, buckled the rails & sent the pirate train into the air & crashing down.

The moler slowed. The trainsfolk watched. The pirates wailed. Dust was spraying. There was a silence. Then: “Come on, we got ’em!”

The Shroakes knew that voice. Caldera grabbed Dero’s arm. On the roof of the moler’s engine a young man stood.

“Wait now,” Dero said, “is it, you don’t know …” But Caldera was whooping. The figure hefted a clumsy pistol. He waved at her.

He stared through yards of air over yards of rails through the window of her own poor battered vehicle, right into Caldera Shroake’s poor tired eyes. With another whoop like a siren, like a train sounding triumph at a journey well done, at an arrival, Caldera leaned out & waved back. At the same moment, each on their own train, she & the newcomer, Sham ap Soorap, smiled.