The Unorthodox Engineers

‘Take it easy on Ivan Nash. He’s a friend of mine, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Try pulling some of those stunts you’ve pulled on me and you’ll probably spend the rest of your career in the deepest and darkest jail he can find.’

‘You can trust me, sir. After all, UE has a reputation to maintain.’

‘That’s precisely what I’m afraid of. Now get the hell out of here. I have an army to run…’

The landing at Hellsport Base did nothing to endear Fritz to the planet. The transfer ferry entered the guiding radio-cage at a tangent, failed to equalize, and bucked and ricochetted from beam to beam until the crew abandoned the automatics and dropped her to the ground under manual control. The ferry touched down with the motors out of synchronization, spun crazily, and dug itself a trench in the sand before it finally swayed to rest. That meant two hours of waiting whilst water jets strove to cool the hull.

Jacko Hine, his second in command, met him at the space-port entrance. Jacko and a small contingent of UE had been sent ahead to make a preliminary survey of the situation. The summary of the reconnaissance was proclaimed by Jacko’s crestfallen attitude and by the way his hair looked as if he’d been grabbing it by handfuls.

‘How does it look?’ asked Fritz suspiciously.

Jacko stared at him for a second or two. ‘Grim,’ he said. ‘If I’d tried to figure out an assignment which would prove UE to be a bunch of useless, incompetent, layabouts I couldn’t have made a better choice.’

‘I knew there was a catch!’ said Fritz. ‘Friend Belling was too polite on handing out this offering. Too polite by half. He’s usually cussing as soon as he sees me coming through his office door.’ Fritz grimaced. ‘But this gives us a chance to prove the bastard wrong once and for all.’

‘Does it? Open your pretty shell-like ear and I’ll pour in a few home truths about Cannis railways. One: no part of the system has been in operation for at least five years. Those parts of the installation which survived the asteroid impact during the war have either fallen down of their own accord or else torn apart by mini- volcanoes.’

Fritz choked on his drink. ‘Volcanoes?’ he queried finally.

‘Sure. Small ones. The thin crust is easily split by quakes, and magma squeezes through the cracks under pressure to form miniature volcanic eruptions. Even at the heyday of the Cannis railway approximately one fifth of the total rail length was always out of commission due to volcanic activity. After five years without maintenance or repair the damage and confusion is simply catastrophic. Nash’s engineers rebuilt five kilometres of new track and suspension last year and two eruptions ruined it within a week.’

‘Go on,’ said Fritz grimly.

‘Two:’ said Jacko. ‘All the new steel has to come from Terra. Delivery delay is a little under two years and a ship can’t deliver more than a hundred tons at a time. There is some good malleable iron locally, but it’s not durable enough for high-stress applications. It’s all right for rails and short supports but the tensile strength is too low to allow its use for major engineering projects.’

‘Enough!’ said Fritz. ‘The rest of the misery I’ll discover for myself. I’m seeing Colonel Nash this afternoon, and after that I want to see some railway.’

‘In that case,’ said Jacko, ‘let’s go to the bar for a drink. We’re going to need it…’

Colonel Nash was waiting for him in his office. There was a certain air of reserve between the two officers which Fritz found vaguely familiar. The reputation of the Unorthodox Engineers usually preceded them. Tales were legion, and some of them were even true.

‘I take it you’ve read the dossier on Cannis IV.’ said Nash. ‘How does it strike you as a job?’

Fritz shrugged. ‘That depends on the type of co-operation we get.’

‘You get whatever you want. This is very much a last-stand project at this point. The Cannis rehabilitation is costing us more than did the war. We can’t afford to mess around here for much longer.’

‘What I want,’ said Fritz, ‘is simple. I just want that we should be left alone. We’ll do our own thing, in our own way.’

‘How do you mean? Discipline, administration, or what?’

‘Everything. Just set us down at a rail point about fifty klicks out and then forget us.’

‘This is bloody irregular,’ said Nash. ‘After all, you are an army unit. What about supplies, for instance?’

‘We’ll find our own.’

‘And steel—you can’t build a railway without steel.’

‘Lack of essentials never yet troubled an unorthodox engineer.’

‘But this is ridiculous!’ said Nash. ‘I didn’t fetch you out from Terra just so you could go play cards in the wilderness.’

‘Look,’ said Fritz quietly, ‘you want a railway. You’ve proven that ordinary methods can’t provide it. Now do I get a crack at it the unorthodox way or do you return to Terra and admit the job has you beat?’

‘Get out!’ said Nash angrily. ‘Get out of my sight before I have you cashiered for impersonating an army officer! I’ll leave you alone, but I promise you one thing… the next time you enter Hellsport it had better be on a bloody train, else I’ll nail you for insubordination and bust you so low you’ll have to say “Sir” to the Padre’s dog.’

‘Thank you!’ said Fritz van Noon. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’

They came across the structure dully silhouetted against the overcast sky. It reminded Fritz of nothing so much as a rotting seaside pier propped awkwardly on random legs clear of the broken terrain below. Jacko had a rope ladder tied to the structure, since the original sling and hoist access had rotted beyond repair. The two climbed gingerly to the platform overhead, brushing the rusting piles and girders, and being showered with dirt from the gaps in the dark decking.

Above the decks the desolation grew. It was a crumbling, grotesque parody of a structure whose impotence in style and form was rendered more alien and yet artistic by the vagaries of slow corrosion. It was like a surrealistic film-set for a comedy of horrors which nobody dared to make. And on the far side, characteristically askew, was a sign board in local script, and after, scrawled in chalk in English, the legend: ‘Hellsport Terminus. The end of the line.’

‘It reminds me,’ said Jacko, ‘of a card house set in a sea of rusty spaghetti.’

Fritz frowned and mooched dismally through the festoons of rusty iron and threadbare cable. ‘What hit it?’ he asked at last.

‘Nothing.’ Jacko guided him away from a bed-plate which had rusted to an extent where an uncautious foot might easily penetrate into the depths below. He pointed to a slag cone, now cold, which had burst through the tracks at mid-point across the terminus, ruining two tracks completely and half filling the remainder of the terminus with light volcanic ash. ‘Apart from the inquisitive volcano everything is just as it was when the last trains went north in the war. Believe me, they’d be using this installation now—only the trains never came back.’

‘Can’t say I blame the trains,’ said Fritz moodily. ‘You mean to tell me this rotting junk heap is still in functional order?’

‘By local standards, yes.’

‘Tell me,’ said Fritz testily, ‘did they have remarkably small trains or is this multiple-rail stuff some sort of gimmick?’

‘I asked about that. Seems that each branch line had its own gauge and some had several according to who built them. At a terminus like this you have to accommodate anything which comes, so you run one track inside another nice and tidily. One snag though—you should see what it does to the points.’

Fritz shuddered visibly despite the warm afternoon air. ‘I’d better see the worst, I suppose.’

They walked out from the terminus to the huge switching grid which served to integrate the various branch lines entering the terminus. There was nearly a kilometre of patchwork mechanical desolation, liberally coated with rust and complex beyond belief. Gantries and galleries were solid with cranks and levers, bars and linkages, rods, and handwound helical springs. Cloth-covered cables and solenoids had dropped their sickly bitumen under the coercion of many summers’ suns, and now lay bleached white and ugly across the rotting spans like the bones of some alien skeleton.

Fritz viewed the scene with increasing dismay. Jacko leaned heavily on a stanchion and eyed his discomfort with a perverse humour.

‘We’re doing fine,’ said Fritz. ‘We’ve got ourselves a station complete with a junior volcano, a marshalling