Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen , Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three
Part Twenty-Four
As soon as Ernest pushed into the clearing, Will scooped him up and whirled him around. "This is it! This is the start of our new life!"
"It won't be," Abraham said, "if you don't quit patting yourself on the back and get to work."
Bizarre idiom. At least, Ernest thought it was an idiom, though he did sneak a glance at Will's back once Will set him down. Thankfully, there was nothing smoldering on it.
Like every other part of the railroad except the rails themselves, the "car" in which they were to travel had begun its existence as something else entirely—a dumpster. Behind it, another linked "car" hovered over the tracks, little more than a lightweight fiberglass platform with some bundles of tools and POD components strapped to the top.
Abraham had mounted the dumpster to the chassis on its side, with the opening hinged at the top. A metal bar propped the lid open wide enough that the travelers could squeeze into the compartment along with the boxes of protein bars, the spare water, whatever scavenged electronics were deemed important enough to add to the payload….
And Martha.
Someone had wrapped her body in the silvery blanket and secured it with cables at waist, neck and knees. She lay atop a row of crates, and both she and the crates were secured with cording threaded through holes that had been punched into the fiberglass sides of the bin. Ernest supposed the other alternative was to strap her in with the gear in the second car—and he also supposed that alternative seemed even sadder.
A single LED taped to the ceiling lit the compartment, throwing harsh shadows that shifted and jumped as the car filled with people. Audrey slung her bag of tools into the dumpster and then turned to give Elizabeth a hand up. "Isn't this weird? I've never traveled inside anything bigger than a POD. All these right angles are making my head spin."
Elizabeth shrank back into the farthest corner of the car and looked for somewhere to strap herself in. "We can talk to each other without a com link and a display while we do it. That's even weirder."
"I had Ernest in my POD with me the other day. But he blooded all over."
"I think you mean bloodied."
"Oh. Even better." She pulled a laser from her bag and cut a small oval through the side of the bin, then poked out the piece and set her eye to the hole. "Still dark."
Will ducked in, all rangy limbs, disconnected the door-opener and held the dumpster lid ajar with his shoulder. The hum of the multiple propulsion units working as one grew louder, some dropping low and others high, until they sounded like a wail, and as the pitch shifted some more, a harmony. A song.
Last in was Abraham. He clasped forearms with Will—both of them used their dominant arms since both of them still had shunts, Ernest noted—and let Will haul him into the car. By his wide-eyed, fierce expression, Ernest deduced that he was excited, though not quite as jubilant as everyone else. If Martha were there to share the moment with him, it probably would have been different. He held a string in one hand, which he handed to Will. "You recruited most of the PODs," he said. "You do the honors."
Abraham was about to let go of Will, who not only kept hold of his forearm, but dragged him into a brief embrace. Abraham shoved him away with an over-emoted brusqueness, and said, "Just flip the switch."
Will tugged the cord, and railroad started to move.
Elizabeth and Audrey cheered, "Hoorah," and Ernest joined in too, like he'd seen members of crowds do on old-time feeds. Kinesthesia told him he was moving, but it felt nothing like gliding along the city's grid with L0U15E. The railroad seemed to vibrate, with energy, yes, there was energy, because everyone's hair had started to float into the air, crackling with static charge. Except for Will's, which looked like it usually did.
Ernest pulled a short length of insulated wire from a scavenged bundle and tied his hair back. Elizabeth laughed at the pink cloud Audrey's hair had become, and Audrey patted it and began to laugh too.
She darted over to the hole she'd cut in the fiberglass with her hair billowing around her. "It's radical—come see," she called over the wail of the propulsion. "It's like a little viewscreen that blows air at your eyeball."
Elizabeth shook her head, still laughing, and pressed her back snugly against the wall. "I'm not going anywhere until we stop."
Ernest slipped past Audrey and pressed his eye to the hole. She was right—the air was startling, as was the rush of tangled undergrowth the railroad brushed past as it moaned its way through the forest on the pair of metal tracks. Ernest drew back from the hole. The sight of the foliage passing made him queasy.
Then the railroad car shuddered and lurched, and he grew queasier still.
"That relay's going to be a problem," Abraham said. He pulled the nanite interface out of Audrey's toolkit and pressed on the dumpster lid as if to open it.
Will grabbed him by the shunt arm. "What are you doing?"
"I need to tweak the—"
"We're moving."
"Oh, really?" Sarcasm. Abraham did it so well. He snatched his arm from Will and said, "We're traveling less than ten kilometers an hour. It's not like I'll be hurt if I fall out."
The railroad shuddered again, more violently now, and Elizabeth's arms shot out to steady her against the back and side wall.
"Let him do it," Ernest said. Strange, how much his voice sounded like Abraham's when he raised it to be heard over the sound of the meshed propulsions. "Otherwise the shaking will keep getting worse."
"Which string do I alter?" Abraham asked him.
"You need to look at them and see which type is overcompensating."
"And how do I determine that?"
"Instead of 01011010111, they'll read 010110101…."
The railroad car bucked, followed by an aftershock as the supply car rocked, and then the propulsion noise turned into a loud keening. "Do you seriously think I read binary?" Abraham indicated the area where the units were mounted with a floorward sweep of his hand. "You need to tweak it. By the time I call out all the digits to you, the loop will destabilize."
"Ernest isn't going to…." Will looked at Ernest, baffled. "Are you?"
Ernest cut his eyes to the edge the floor where the dumpster lid flapped open a few centimeters the next time the relays slipped. The ground rushing by made a chewed and mostly-dissolved protein bar creep back up Ernest's esophagus. "We either need to fix it now while we're moving, or stop and do it after sunrise, once the panels recharge. But stopping and starting in the dark won't work. It will consume too much charge."
Will looked as if he was all for stopping, but Abraham said, "We can't abort this close to camp. A sharp-eyed Storm Trooper will be able to see us without even using a sensor."
"You don't know they're coming tonight," Will argued.
"You don't know they're not."
"I'll do it," Ernest said, before he could dwell on the thought of the sickening way the individual leaves and grasses seemed to blur and blend as they swept by—or as the railroad swept by them. "Give me the interface."
Ernest flattened himself face-down on the floor, with the gap in the dumpster lid feeding puffs of air down the neckhole of his shirt. "We're not going any faster now than anyone could run," Abraham said, handing the patched-together interface to Ernest. "You'll be fine."
Ernest glanced down at the grass rushing past and couldn't come up with an answer to that. Will grabbed him by the thighs. His fingers dug in deep. "I've got you."
Abraham said, "The main thing is to do it before the screen goes dead. There's not much charge in it."
If it were an old-time feed Ernest had been watching, the man who was about to do something risky to save the group would have had something memorable to say—something rakish, something jaunty. But Ernest only said, "I'll be quick. I type fast."
In general, magnetic propulsion provided a very smooth ride, and this was true even of the railroad—except when the relays slipped out of synch, and the firing of two propulsion units overlapped where only one was needed, or another shut down before its replacement could kick in. The railroad alternately lagged and lurched, with irregularly-spaced moments of eerily calm gliding in between the lurches. It was during one such lurch that Ernest tried to connect the interface to the nanite port and nearly dropped the device. He was positive Abraham had seen him fumble, since Abraham was the one wedging the door-flap open with his shoulder so that Ernest could hang out. But Abraham said nothing, and when Will's fingers dug in to the point of pain, Ernest chose to say nothing as well. It was with a certain grim satisfaction that, despite the lurching and lagging, and despite the grass rushing by his head and even catching the strands of hair that had come loose from the bit of insulated wire, Ernest aligned the interface to the port and rammed it home.
The cracked screen flashed, went dark, paused…then read: HELLO.
Ernest scrolled through the commands and tweaked a few that would add a bit of efficiency to the relays as they flashed past. He snuck a look up at Abraham to see if he'd be warned not to try anything fancy, but the way Abraham had himself braced to keep the flap from whacking Ernest every time the car lurched, he couldn't even see outside the car. Ernest was surprised he was being allowed to perform an unsupervised modification. Surprised and pleased.
A few more tweaks, and then the string of binary Ernest had been searching for scrolled onto the screen. He even double-checked it—something he seldom did, as a speed-reader, but it was too critical of a juncture to risk an error, and he began to overwrite it with a few deft twitches of his….
"Hey!"
A figure in white was running alongside the railroad. Ernest flinched back and felt Will's fingers drill into the muscle of his thighs. Security Op gear, but dirty. And the figure wasn't shorn-haired, he was bald. Benjamin.
"You. Stop."
Ernest didn't see a Taser or a syringe, but he knew better now than to underestimate a security op; he'd seen what they'd done to Martha with no more than bare hands. He hurriedly keyed in the rest of the sequence.
"Did you hear me? I said stop."
"I heard you," Ernest muttered, and unplugged the interface.
"You. Take me. Do you hear? Take me?"
"Oh, so now you want to come along? After you led your friends right to us?"
"Not friends."
Ernest slipped the interface inside, where Audrey took it from him. One of Will's hands disengaged from his thigh, leaving five bright points of pressure-induced pain behind, and grabbed him by the clear-wrapped forearm. White pain-motes danced around the perimeter of Ernest's vision, then cleared.
"Reclaim," Benjamin gasped. He could indeed run as fast as the railroad, but only with great effort. "Deacon wants me in Reclaim."
"Are you talking to someone?" Abraham crouched beside Ernest, balanced precariously in the car, and pushed open the dumpster lid as far as he could. "Who is that?"
Never mind, Ernest was about to say. He's tiring. We'll lose him quickly enough. And yet the look on Benjamin's face: pain, sorrow, regret—he might not have the words to express them. But there they were.
Whether Abraham would choose to acknowledge those emotions was another matter. "That's the one who led them to our grid."
His name is Benjamin, Ernest thought. But he decided it might not be wise to say so. It wouldn't take much for Abraham to decide he'd been right all along, and Ernest really was in league with the Deacons. And a few well placed kicks from him would be all it took to show Ernest how foolhardy it was to perform a repair hanging out of a moving railroad car to begin with.
"Stop! Take me!" Benjamin's cries grew more desperate, and ragged as the running began to take its toll. Ernest felt something—there'd be no asking L0U15E to help him pinpoint the motion—a subtle variation of sadness, though. Sad for Benjamin, even though Ernest wanted to be angry.
Benjamin dropped back a few steps, and his breathing came in deep gasps. Soon he would no longer be able to run, and the railroad would leave him behind. "Take me," he demanded. But his face spoke so much more eloquently than that. His eyes told Ernest he was afraid of the Deacons, afraid of Reclaim, and probably afraid of all the other security ops as well. That if he knew then that everything the Deacons said was a cleverly designed lie to sustain the systems they'd built, he never would have gone to them with his information in the first place. What his look said to Ernest was….
"Sorry." Ernest had blurted it out—with Abraham right over him. He added, "We can't trust you."
Benjamin's vocabulary recall was rudimentary, but he wasn't stupid. He seized the word and made it his own. "I'm sorry," he said. It sounded almost like an accusation. He tried again—screwed up his face and bellowed, "I'm sorry!"
Will caught hold of Ernest's shirt at the shoulder, bunched the fabric in his fist, and hauled on it. Ernest was dragged backed in, and Abraham pulled down the flap.
"I'm sorry!" The cry carried through the fiberglass, only somewhat muted, and the sound of it broke Ernest's heart.
He will die if we leave him. Maybe that argument would have gotten Ernest somewhere with Abraham when Martha was still alive—but not now. Still, Ernest had to do something. "He knows about the tracks," Ernest said.
Everyone looked at him, and he could see they knew it was so, even if they hadn't yet extrapolated what it meant.
"If we leave him here," he went on—carefully, because if he sounded too sympathetic, he was sure he'd be labeled as a Deaconist agent, "he'll be close enough go back and tell the others."
Abraham and Will locked gazes. Will had never let go of Ernest's dominant arm, and his fingers dug in as hard as they had to prevent Ernest from falling out of the moving car. Ernest wanted to squeeze him back, to beg him through that touch to do the right thing—to even understand what the right thing was without it being explained to him. But if Ernest did so in front of Abraham, his credibility would vanish. And so he said nothing, did nothing, and waited.
"If we leave him behind," Abraham said evenly, "he'll tell the others about the tracks. But if we bring him along, he might sneak back and betray us again, or he might not. The only way to be absolutely sure he doesn't is to kill him."
"That's true," Will said, and Ernest felt so dismayed he could hardly restrain himself from grabbing Will in front of everyone and shaking him—whether that exposed Ernest's sympathies or not. Then Will said, "But I can't do it."
I'm sorry! filtered in through the flap, accompanied by a few thumps that vibrated the dumpster lid as Benjamin slapped it in his desperation.
Abraham cut his eyes to the place the slaps were sounding from. "Either can I," he said. "But we can't leave him here."
He pushed the lid open and called out to Benjamin over the whine of the engine, "We're not slowing down for you. If you want to come along, hop in back with the supplies."
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