Tungsten Dreams
by Noah Isherwood
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Getting comfortable with the suit had taken him some time, but he was quite used to its constraints by now. The strength augmentation was supposedly calibrated precisely to counteract Baraq’s high gravity, but Rourke found that he felt quite a bit more powerful than he did at one-G. The exoskeleton that provided strength assistance was integrated into a heavily padded jumpsuit of reinforced textiles that all residents of Baraq wore while outside the habitable domes. The suits could be pressurized and contained such armor as may be necessary to guard against planetary hazards, and the helmet had an integrated audio-visual system, as well as an executive function that controlled the suit’s atmospherics and power management.
Rourke had been told that he could control various features of the suit manually via voice control should his helmet be compromised in any way, but his safety instructor had said this was an unlikely event. His exact words were “wildly unprecedented,” which had stuck in Rourke’s mind for some reason.
As he entered the crew lounge of the locomotive, Rourke unbuttoned the upper third of his suit but did not remove it. Unlike some of the other engineers, Rourke valued the support that kept the gravity at bay more than possible escape from the stuffy suit. The crew accommodations aboard Hamilcar-12 were designed with the suits in mind anyhow; wearing it by no means made the off-shift unbearable.
Rourke sat down in a wide chair in front of the right-side picture window after retrieving a cup of cold tea from the galley, gazing across the flats and humming along to a jazz riff that had wormed its way into his mind. After finishing his drink, he rose and retired to his bunk for a nap.
The on-shift buzzer woke Rourke from a strange dream. In it, he had found himself trying to run across the desert of Baraq. He was not wearing his exosuit, and the planet tugged him downwards. He had to fight to stand, much less run, and his limbs soon felt like lead. Looking ahead, he saw that he was running after someone, and it was clear he was losing the race. Ahead of the figure, he saw the finish line, a small boulder whose weathered surface looked vaguely like a brooding human countenance: landmark thirty-nine, Thinking Rock.
The figure racing ahead outstripped Rourke by far, and it soon arrived at Thinking Rock, climbing atop it in triumph. As Rourke watched himself lose the race, the figure sank into the stone. Dream-Rourke stopped dead in his tracks, succumbing to gravity. A tremor shuddered through the ground, and the boulder underwent a radical transformation, stretching into spirals and rising off the ground like a dust devil, morphing itself from dust to muck to flesh, taking on the form of a giant human figure. Just as it turned to face Rourke, lying prostrate in the grit of the plain, the buzzer roused him from sleep.
Hot beads of sweat stood out on his cold brow, and he gave a shudder as he rose from the bunk. He buttoned his suit as he clattered to the bridge, twisting his helmet on and stepping through the door.
“Brakes are all good, no thanks to you,” Bear said.
“I knew you could do it all by yourself.”
“I realized something,” Bear said, ignoring the jab.
“What’s that?” Rourke asked.
“This is your ninety-ninth run on old Hammy.”
“Is it now?”
“You know it! Next go-around will be your final run as a greenhorn. A hundred makes you a real railroader.”
“Sure.”
“Course, you won’t be a veteran like me until at least a thousand.”
“Get lost, you haven’t been on a thousand runs out here,” Rourke scoffed.
“Not on Ham-12, but I’ve spent twenty years riding the rails. I’ve lost count of how many trips it is all told.”
“Damn, you’re even older than you look, then.”
“Bah, big talk coming from the oldest green-eared grease monkey I’ve ever encountered. I know kids half your age who can tell the difference between AAR and IGRN faster than you could if your life depended on it.”
“Well, at least I can tell the difference between my suit and a dumpster.”
Bear looked down at his stained exosuit, taut across his large midsection. He glared at Rourke for a moment before bursting into a deep guffaw.
“I knew they brought you around for something. Gotta have a laugh-man out here.”
“Mhm,” Rourke grunted.
Bear retreated from the bridge, chuckling to himself, and Rourke was alone again, free to drift along with the sand outside the windows for another few hours, contemplating his dream while studying the muddy sky and wondering if dust could cast a shadow.
The rotation of shifts carried on according to routine, and Rourke made his way through roughly half of his landmark journal by the time the outward bound portion of the run came to a close, adding a thought here and sketched line there.
As the train approached the tungsten mines, Rourke stood by for the loading process, viewing the sights, such as they were. As the train slowly rounded the final curve before the loading tunnel, Rourke marked the single landmark that bridged the outward and return halves of the run, the near edge of Baraq’s distant polar icecap, landmark number ten.
Thanks to a hallucinogenic epiphany, Rourke named this pivotal landmark The Ice Axis. It seemed profound to him that the turning point of Hamilcar-12’s route also represented the rotational axis of the planet itself. The ice was often only visible on clear days, and even then only as a suggested brightness on the horizon. Rourke had to strain to glimpse it at all before Hamilcar-12 crawled into the shadowy loading tunnel.
The radio crackled to life as Bear punched buttons and adjusted knobs on the control panel.
“Howdy, Ham-12, ready for your medicine? Over.”
“Sick as a dog in here, Big Fella. Over,” Bear replied.
“We’re looking at a gross of 75k today. Copy?”
“Copy that. Calculating. Over.”
Rourke plugged the weight of the tungsten ore into the computer. The screen in front of him flickered as the computer calculated the appropriate acceleration formulas, displaying a series of numbers and commands that Rourke began entering into a separate terminal.
“Computation complete. Drop that load. Over,” Bear said.
“Here it comes. Pleasure doing business with you, Bear. Over.”
“Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Take us to dinner next time, will you? Over.”
“We heard it’s the youngsters hundredth run next time you’re up here. We’re buying the drinks then, so don’t get greedy now, old man. Over.”
“That’s a 10-4, super chief! The greenhorn’s crying with gratitude. Over.”
“How sentimental, Ham-12. Safe returns. Loadmaster out.”
“Till next time, old son. Ham-12 out. See kid? A hundred matters around here.”
“S’pose so,” Rourke said.
Already, he could hear the ore being loaded, a raucous staccato ringing out over the bass hum of the locomotive as pellets of pure tungsten poured into the twenty-meter hopper cars. The progress of the train slowed as it gained weight, and the drivers increased in power to compensate. Rourke felt the rumble of the train as its true power began to show through.
This rumble would grow to a roar as the empty carriages filled with metal and the engines had to produce real torque to get back up and running. By the time they reached top speed, the vibrations would be nearly bone-shattering were it not for the train’s complex dampening systems and the support of the exosuits. Even after so many times experiencing the sheer might of the machine he ran, Rourke was still awed by the magnitude of Hamilcar-12.
The ore was loaded over the course of two shifts, and when Rourke returned to the bridge, the train was gaining speed again. Bear stretched as his relief opened the door.
“We’re still getting up steam, just hit a buck fifty when I buzzed you. You can probably feel it in your fillings,” Bear said.
“Getting up steam, huh? You been shoveling coal up here, you old railroader?”
“Oho, you know it, piglet! The big dogs are walking the high iron, let me tell you.”
Rourke snapped a mock salute. “Good enough, skipper, I’ll see to the rest of this highball.”
“Ha, swell, see you around then.”
No sooner had Bear left the bridge than an alarm chime sounded from the control board. Rourke silenced the alert and studied the pop-up advisory: sandstorm warning. Outside, the desert slipped by as usual, but Rourke could make out the bruise on the horizon ahead that forebode a change in the weather.
He almost keyed the intercom to warn Bear, but thought twice. It didn’t look that bad, and if he initiated formal foul weather procedures he wouldn’t get to spin up a musical prelude to the storm. Bear didn’t like Rourke’s music, and he wanted a chance to enjoy the sound and fury alone. He dismissed the warning and settled into his seat, packing two sticks of Fun-Gum into his lip to await the weather.
Rourke watched as the hazy line of clouds began to define itself into a wall of sand, khaki and black waves swirling up into the dull sky as the train hurried towards the squall line, nearing top speed by the second. Rourke’s stomach bubbled with giddiness as he watched the redoubt of grit and wind charge towards him.
Twisting the audio dial on his command pad, he began building up a tension of horns over the rising thrum of the train and wind. A wild idea came to him: he was going to make a momentary landmark, the union of top speed, musical crescendo, and storm front. What a thing that would be, a place, a time, an event, only existing for the briefest of moments.
He nudged the throttle ahead just a touch, dismissing the warning codes with a glee buoyed up by the chemicals coursing through his veins. Rourke chewed with abandon and lowered his visor, cranking up the volume as the psychoactives took hold. His limbs shook with anticipation as the tempest loomed larger, the train ran hotter, and the music ramped up and up and up to chase Rourke’s high.
As it happened, the storm reached the tracks when the train was just three clicks shy of full speed, arriving with a gust that slammed into the speeding vehicle and made it shake. Rourke’s music came to a peak with a crash, and he whooped, throwing his hands in the air before fading the instrumentation out into a driving drone.
Through the forward window, all he could see was an undulating mass of gray backlit by bright purple as distant lightning leaped to and fro amongst billions of swirling dust motes and grains of tungsten sand. The train bore the wind well, taking only minor tremors as it continued on its way.
The worst of the storm seemed to abate quickly, and visibility began to improve after a half our or so, throughout which Rourke’s teeth chattered with excitement as the storm threw periodic gusts to batter the locomotive. He was delirious with adrenaline and awash with hazy chemicals. It was the worst storm he had seen yet, and the magnificent machine in his care was taking it well in stride, rushing forward with its own triumphant fanfare.
It all changed in a blink. In the corner of his eye, Rourke caught sight of a speck in the clouds, something buffeted and carried by the wind. This speck grew exponentially as it approached, revealing itself to be a massive bar of dark metal. Rourke’s excitement caught in his throat and turned to dread as the bar slammed into the side of the locomotive. It blew forward and disappeared beneath the nose of the engine, and Rourke pulled back on the throttle, easing it down a few percentage points in a panic and willing the object to be gone.
The train barely decelerated, but instantly there arose a great clang from ahead of the bridge. Rourke’s eyes flicked to the front window as the bar reappeared before the train, having been launched back into the air by the pilot as it slowed. He choked on his own breath as the bar’s jagged end impacted the engine again, with force, square in the middle of the windscreen. It pierced the thick glass.
Bracing himself, Rourke turned to the side as the sharp metal screeched its way into the locomotive at hundreds of kilometers per hour, passing through the front bulkhead like paper and tearing its merry way through the rear wall of the bridge. Rourke found that he had forgotten how to breathe, and tried to relearn as he fought his mounting panic and rolling high.
He remembered that in the event of an emergency such as this, the train was meant to automatically brake, and hard. He braced again, but there was no sign of stopping. He counted down from ten, then seventeen, then thirty-eight. Nothing. Hamilcar-12 sped on into the whelming clouds of dust.
Rourke slammed the on-shift buzzer again and again, keying his comms mic and yelling for Bear, over and over. Bear arrived instantly, catching Rourke by surprise.
“What the hell happened? I came as soon as I heard impact.”
Bear was yelling over the roar of the wind, which was pouring its biting grit through the hole in the front of the locomotive. Rourke’s music played on, the down-pitch blare of slowed saxophones harmonizing with the keening wind.
“A bar crashed through the window and we aren’t stopping! I couldn’t stop it! I tried but I couldn’t stop it!”
“Not your fault, kid, accidents happen! Now let’s unscrew this hog!”
“No, no, no, that’s wrong, it’s wrong,” Rourke sobbed.
Bear surveyed the damage and pulled several levers that Rourke could not remember being taught about. Nothing changed. The control board still blared and flashed, the hole in the aft wall sparked, and Rourke cowered on the floor with his music roaring in his ears.
Bear shook his head. “This is bad. The debris fritzed out the automatic braking and manual override won’t answer. External comms are dead too, damn this storm! We’ve got to get back to the hack to trigger the manual back-up braking system.”
“Back to the hack,” Rourke slurred back at Bear.
“Right, we’re going to have to hump it over the top of the consist.”
“What? What! You’re crazy, that’s crazy,” Rourke wailed.
“Unless you can teleport our asses back there, it’s the only way. Follow me!”
Bear led Rourke out of the bridge, past the gaping wound filled with sparking wires, leaving the door flapping in the wind behind them. Opening a locker in the crew lounge, he yanked out two black nylon bags. Dumping one on a table, he gestured to a pile of gear that looked uncommonly like a pile of spiders to Rourke.
“Watch me,” Bear yelled. “This is what’s going to keep you alive up there.”
Bear lifted the twisted mass of straps, buckles, and canisters and untangled it with one fluid motion. Rourke had never seen the older man move so fast, and though he was meant to be watching Bear’s hands, he studied the engineer’s face. The tension of the moment, the decisiveness of action, it smoothed the lines on Bear’s face, and Rourke realized that his supervisor was not nearly so old as he once thought.
Bear caught Rourke’s zoned-out look and clapped his hands in front of his helmet. “Hey! Eyes here!” He held up the second mass of nylon and metal, pointing out and naming several parts and their functions, but Rourke could barely hear over the trilling of a trumpet and the roar of the wind that had wormed its way into his mind. The most he could do was nod along to Bear’s demonstration, taking bare visual notes as he watched the straps and buckles become fastened, power cords get plugged in, and actuators tested, all in a series of gestural images the color of pale flesh. He watched as Bear tightened the emergency harness around his own exosuit and gestured for Rourke to do the same.
Rourke looked at the spidery mass on the table, wriggling in the wind as much as in his mind. He began to follow the steps he had watched Bear perform, but he could not connect the images he had remembered into a series of motions. As he attempted to put his arm through a loop that was clearly meant for his leg, his hands began to shake uncontrollably.
Bear snatched the harness from his hands and slammed it to the table. Grabbing Rourke by the shoulders, Bear shook him and yelled through the comm system. The staticky music in Rourke’s ears abruptly ended as he was nearly deafened by the irate engineer.
“Wake the hell up, Rourke! Wake up and get it together! We don’t have time for this!”
He picked up Rourke’s gear again and, handing it back, jabbed directions and laid out his plan as he helped Rourke strap in.
“No, that’s upside down, here. We’re going to be climbing through the upper access hatch and taking the catwalk back to the cage to try and stop this battleship. Yeah, cinch that one down hard. Luckily, this hotshot won’t meet traffic for another thousand clicks, but that’s worth jack when you’re running eighth notch with no brakes. Plug that in right there, no, no, there, yes, now you should see the read-out on your display.”
Copyright © 2024 by Noah Isherwood
