Night Train to Rigel

“Trust me, it is,” I said, trying to think. I didn’t know how many Spiders there were aboard, but it was surely going to be a while longer before even a whole train full of walkers could take out all of them. We had that much breathing space to work with. “Bayta, is there anything you can do with the engine?” I asked. “Speed us up, slow us down—anything?”

“No,” she said dully. “Not from here.”

“But you talk to the Spiders,” I reminded her.

“It’s not the same,” she snapped suddenly. “If I was in the engine, I could do something. But I’m not.” She gave another spastic twitch, and her shoulders sagged. “And there’s no way to get there.”

“Why not?” McMicking asked.

“Because there just isn’t,” she said. “There aren’t any passageways between the engine and the rest of the train.”

“But it’s obviously connected to us,” I said. “Can we get to it from the outside?”

“There’s no air out there,” Losutu said. “Not enough to breathe, anyway.”

“There are medical kits in every car,” McMicking pointed out. “They all have emergency oxygen breathers, right?”

“Yes,” Bayta said slowly, a note of cautious hope starting to creep into her voice. “And there are bigger cylinders, too, for emergency repressurization. We could maybe use one of those to pressurize the engine compartment once we’re there.”

“Then we’re in,” I said. “How do we get the doors open?”

Bayta sighed. “We can’t,” she said, the spark of hope going out again. “They’re pressure-locked.”

“All of them?” Losutu asked.

Bayta nodded. “We’d need someone with the strength of a drudge to force one open.” She hesitated. “But there are some roof panels in the baggage cars for getting extra-large cargo crates in and out. They’re heavy, but they’re not airlocked. We might be able to get one open.”

“But they’re all the way at the back of the Quadrail,” Losutu objected. “How are we going to get there with the Modhri in the way?”

“Leave that to us,” I said, lifting my eyebrows questioningly at McMicking. “You game?”

“Absolutely,” he said grimly. “Let’s show this Modhri what a couple of primitives can do.”

Our first task was to collect all the oxygen tanks we would need. McMicking and I did that, slipping back to the first-class coach and retrieving the emergency medical kit and its oxygen breather. Fortunately, the passengers were still gone, apparently out beating Spiders to death. The breather’s tank wasn’t very big, but it ought to be enough to get one of us to the engine.

The actual mechanics of which I hadn’t quite worked out yet. As far as I knew, when Bayta and I had jumped off at Jurskala we’d been the first people to even stick our noses outside a moving Quadrail. Climbing on top of one going full tilt down the Tube was at least an order of magnitude crazier. There were so many unknowns, in fact, that it didn’t even pay to start listing them, and I would probably have voted to try the barricade approach if it hadn’t been for the absolute certainty that that would leave us all dead.

We also found and removed the emergency repressurization tank Bayta had mentioned. It turned out to be not just a simple tank, but a complete self-controlled supply/scrubber/regulator system. It also weighed nearly as much as Bayta, but fortunately it came with a built-in carrying harness that would easily convert to a backpack.

We returned to the compartment and dropped off both tanks, then pulled the medical kit from our own car. That gave us two personal-sized tanks, which added to the stretcher’s tank and the spare we’d brought from Jurskala Station gave us the four we would need for the trek across the top of the train.

Meanwhile, Bayta and Losutu hadn’t been idle. As per our instructions they’d set the stretcher up on its wheels and loaded it with spare clothing and bedding and everything else flammable they could find or tear loose from the compartments’ furnishings. They’d also rigged up shoulder or belt harnesses for the four oxygen tanks.

And with that, we were ready.

“As ready as we’re going to be, anyway,” I said, adjusting the small personal oxygen tank at my waist and manhandling the big one onto the stretcher’s center equipment rack. Now, more than ever, I wished I’d asked the Spiders for a gun when I’d had the chance. “Oh, and grab those two carrybags, too,” I told McMicking, pointing at my luggage.

“You want to bother with luggage?” he demanded, crossing the room and bringing back the bags.

“Trust me,” I told him as I stowed them on the stretcher’s lower rack. “Bayta? You ready?”

“I think so,” she said. She was still pale, but her voice was firm. Whatever black valley she’d gone through when the Spiders started dying, she’d worked her way through it. “Director?”

“I don’t like any of this, if you want to know the truth,” Losutu said, his voice heavy. “Attacking and maybe killing a whole group of people, especially people who aren’t accountable for their actions—”

“They’re not people,” McMicking interrupted. “They’re targets, or enemy combatants, or bug-eyed monsters. Not people. You start thinking about them that way and you’ll be dead.”

“I understand the emotional necessities of warfare, thank you,” Losutu said icily. “I just wish we didn’t have to do it.”

“I wish we had Fayr and his commando squad along,” I countered. “You don’t always get what you wish for.”

“If we did, we’d have some real weapons,” McMicking added sourly. “Unless those Spiders are putting up one hell of a fight, none of this is going to get us very far.”

He was right, of course; our gimmicked stretcher was hardly battlefield shock armor. But it was all we had. “You want some plastic Belldic status guns to wave around?” I offered, nodding toward the bed where they’d ended up when Bayta had pulled the clothing out of my carrybags. “Fayr gave them to me before we left him.”

“Really,” McMicking said, frowning over at the guns. “Why?”

I opened my mouth… closed it again. “Good question,” I said, going over and picking them up. You may need these, Fayr had said. Not exactly the sort of comment a person usually makes when offering someone else a souvenir.

But right after that, Bayta and I had jumped off the Quadrail, and I’d stuffed the guns into my luggage, and somehow I’d never gotten around to wondering what he might have meant. “See what you can find,” I told McMicking, handing him one of the guns.

We examined them in silence as Losutu and Bayta watched over our shoulders. The entire gun was made of soft plastic, except for a decorative braided tassel attached to the bottom of the grip which seemed to be some sort of synthetic silk. The gun was definitely hollow, but a methodical squeezing didn’t reveal any telltale lumps that might have indicated something hidden inside. Not that they could have gotten anything dangerous past the Spiders’ sensors anyway. The oversized barrel was closed at the business end, and had some ribbing running lengthwise at various points along its surface that gave it a certain rigidity. Not enough to make it a useful weapon, though, given how light it was.

Unless… “Check the barrel,” I told McMicking, running my fingers around the socket where it fit into the rest of the gun. “See if you can find a way to get it— Never mind,” I interrupted myself as the barrel snicked free. The tube was closed at both ends, I saw now, but the inner end had the look of a pressure-threaded cap. There were also a pair of eyelets on the cap that had been concealed by the socket, eyelets that extended upward from the cap without opening into the interior of the tube itself.

“Toy nightsticks?” Losutu hazarded as McMicking also pulled his gun barrel free.

“Better than that,” I assured him, unscrewing the cap and handing it and the barrel to Bayta. “Here—fill it with water. All the way up—no bubbles. Yours, too, McMicking.”

“Okay, that’ll make them heavier,” Losutu said, still frowning as the others headed for the washroom. “They’re still too short to be much good as clubs.”

“Watch and learn,” I told him, turning over what was left of my gun and starting to unfasten the tassel. “Westali did a study once on how someone might improvise weapons from things available on a Quadrail. Looks like the Bellidos did us one better.”

I had the tassel unbraided into a single smooth silk cord by the time McMicking and Bayta returned with the water-filled barrels. They held them steady while I threaded the cord through the eyelets on the tops of both barrels, leaving a few centimeters of slack as I wove the cord back and forth between them. When I was finished, I