Railsea

escapees, as Gansiffer Brownall & the others clubbed mole rats breaching all around them, & fired into the moiling ground. At the cart’s edge rose a flannelly animal face, all quivering whiskers & malevolent percussion. Sham grabbed for anything heavy & it was a kettle left for some dumb reason in the cart that his hand found & which he swung.

Vurinam staggered as he landed, smacked heavily into Unkus Stone. Who himself staggered to the cart’s edge, tipped, toppled, fell out, between two sets of rails.

Onto the ground.

Stone floundered. He sank a clear inch into crumbling earth. Quite redundantly—everyone saw it—someone screamed: “Man overboard!”

Mole rats looked up with a simultaneous motion, puppets on one string. The capsized carriage itself shuddered, as if something big & underneath it paid sudden attention. Synchronised, the mole rats dived, bite-burrowed towards Unkus. Moving towards the jollycart, a ridge was rising in the earth.

“Grab hold!” Vurinam shouted, stretching out his hand. “Move!” Unkus crawled. Incompetent quadruped. Mole rats moved in with gusts of stygian dust. Ploughed massively from below, that big furrow still grew. Stone screamed.

Vurinam grabbed him & pulled, & others grabbed Vurinam. Agitated bats swept in chaos around Sham, making him flail. The earth rampart rose & growled & cracked & within, Sham could see a huge hump of saggy skin, a mole-rat back twice the size of any other. The mole rats were a hive, & what was coming was the queen.

There was an explosion of dirt, a great biting down, a glimpse of great mouthness. Sham cried out, Vurinam tugged, Unkus wailed & was pulled aboard. There was a rumbling as the queen descended invisibly, preyless, frustrated. The earth settled. But Unkus still screamed. A mole rat was dangling by clenched teeth from his bloody leg. “Hit the bloody thing!” Brownall shouted.

It was Sham who did. Smacked it with his kettle harder than he’d smacked anything before. The beast somersaulted backwards into the accelerating cart’s dirt.

There was one moment of exhilaration, one ragged cheer as the women & men of the Medes left the marauding colony. Then it was over & they saw the state of Unkus.

TEN

THE CREW OF THE MEDES CROWDED THE EDGES OF the cartops, in agonies at the attack they had seen but could not reach. Unkus moaned.

Sham heard a faint, pathetic beating & saw a flutter of colour. In the corner of the cart was an injured daybat. It flipped & fiddled, pitiful on damaged wings. He must have hit it when he swung. It foamed weakly from its mouth.

Vurinam went to tip it out. “No,” Sham said. He lifted it gently. It snapped at him, groggily enough that those teeth were easy to avoid. When his turn came to cross the walkway between the Medes & the cart, Sham had the daybat wrapped in his shirt.

The doctor was waiting for him. Took hold of him brusquely, checked he was not hurt, patted his shoulder & told him to get ready. Behind him, Unkus Stone was being carried aboard.

“HOW’S HE DOING, DOC?” The questions kept coming from the corridor. “Can we talk to him?” The doctor took off the bloody apron, caught Sham’s eye & nodded. Sham, still swallowing at the sight of the procedure, opened the surgery door to the crew.

“Alright,” Fremlo said with the abruptness of exhaustion. “Come in. You’ll not get much off him. Drugged him to the gills. & do not touch his leg.”

“Which leg?”

“Either bloody leg.”

Sham got out to give them room. He listened to them whisper.

“What did you find, Sham ap Soorap?” someone said.

He looked up. It was the captain.

Abacat Naphi. Her prosthetic arm was raised, barring his way. He stared into her dark blue eyes. They were about the same height, & he was heavier, but he felt as if he was craning back his neck to meet her gaze. Sham stammered. She had not spoken to him before, except for sentences like, “Move,” “Put it over there,” & “Get out.” He was astonished that she knew his name.

“Answer,” Fremlo growled.

Sham wondered: Where’d the doctor come from?

“Captain, I …” Sham said. His bat—no hiding it now—squeaked.

“Attention,” Captain Naphi said. “Later we’ll consider whether you can keep your vermin, ap Soorap. Now we answer questions. What was in the wreck?”

“Nothing, Ma’am Captain,” Sham stuttered. “A skeleton I mean is all. That was it. That & only else also just rubbish.”

“Is that so?” Naphi said. She closed her eyes & lowered her artificial arm, leaving a thread of exhaust & the murmur of motors. Sham watched the intricacy of its workings, the lines of its black wood.

“Nothing, Ma’am Captain, not a thing.” Are you insane? Sham thought. Why you lying? & even as he thought about the little scrap of salvage he’d found that was his by finder’s right, he heard himself saying, “Oh except only this,” as he fished out the card from his pocket & gave it to her.

“If I might, Captain?” Fremlo was beckoning for her to follow—who else on the train could do that? Naphi looked once more, thoughtfully, at Sham.

“Thank you for the memory,” she said. She took it & followed Fremlo. Sham watched them go. Stood unmoving but for grinding jaw. Inside he was raging, demanding his tiny salvage back.

A STORM WAS COMING. Sham watched through portholes while clouds lowered, descending below the upsky & changing their nature, drawing rain across the landscape, turning the world to mud & replenishing pools & puddles between rails, speeding up the streams gushing from islands. The slick trainlines shone. The injured daybat stuck its head up from Sham’s shirt, as if it, too, wanted to watch the sky. He stroked it.

“Soorap,” Dr. Fremlo had said to him when they started work on Stone. “We know this is not your favourite activity. I ask only that you stay out of the way, do as I tell you when I tell you. You may not like it, you may not be very good at it—you are not, in fact, very good at it, & if I can tell that, that means you are very not very good at it—but you are probably somewhat better than nothing. So if I say bandage, you know what to do. & so forth. His leg’s at risk. Let’s do what we can.”

After the whispered exchange with Naphi, Fremlo had found him again. “You do know,” the doctor had said, “that you don’t have to obey orders?”

“I thought that was the whole point of orders!”

“Oh yes, but no.” Fremlo’s voice had dropped. “I mean you are obligated to, formally, yes, but it’s not uncommon to not. You really wanted that card, did you not?”

Sham, vivid red, could not tell if this was a rebuke, advice, or what.

“Good,” he heard someone say, looking at the storm. “Drown the bloody things.” A fine curse & worthy anger, though it wouldn’t happen. Like all tellurian animals of the railsea, mole rats had strategies to avoid that fate when it rained. Airlocks, water traps, complicated tunnel shafts.

Sham saw Brank. Sham started a moment, but Brank barely looked at him. There were more important matters than briefly pilfered cockerel on the big man’s mind. Even Yashkan was too distracted to glance at Sham with more than a moment’s malevolence. He thought for a moment that he had escaped anger. It came for him, though, & from an unexpected direction.