Tungsten Dreams

by Noah Isherwood

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts 1, 2, 3

conclusion

Rourke read the pop-up message on his helmet screen: “Exterior maintenance containment apparatus, V2.3.1, booting up.”

Bear continued: “This rig is a failsafe for your suit’s feet. Those magnets should keep us anchored to the roof of this hog, but the wind is wicked up there, so these lines make sure there’s always more than two points of contact. Stash these batteries in your pouch. It’s a fifteen-click walk, and we may run out of juice before we get to the cage.”

“What if we don’t make it in time?”

“We will.”

“But what if we don’t?”

“Then this rig is going to end up spread out over about a hundred clicks of desert when it eats dirt at Qart Hadast. But we won’t be letting that happen. Let’s go!”

“But—”

Bear clunked off towards the rear of the locomotive. Rourke followed at the exosuit equivalent of a jog, babbling nonsense into the mic and bouncing off the walls. Bear ignored his protests, taking hold of a metal hand-wheel and cranking open a hatch in the ceiling. He pulled a ladder from the wall and affixed its top rung to the edge of the yawning hole above, smacking it firmly into place. Tawny clouds of sand whipped by overhead, whistling eerily around the gap in the roof.

Bear turned to Rourke and clasped his hand. “Bad as it looks, this is all standard procedure, for emergencies anyhow. It’s bad, no lie, but we can fix it. In the event that only one of us makes it... ah, screw that. The safety rig will basically run itself, but you can manually aim it with voice commands. You’ll see what I mean. Come on!”

“Wait!”

“What?”

“I go first,” Rourke said with an unhoped-for confidence. “This happened on my watch.”

Bear peered into Rourke’s eyes, and Rourke bit his tongue. Why had he said that? Bear nodded. “Good with me! You’ll be a veteran yet. Now squirrel on up there!”

He shoved Rourke towards the ladder, and Rourke gripped a rung with both hands, pausing to stare blankly up at the hatch looming above. His ears thrummed with a beat that could have been his heart, the locomotive, the memory of a trombone, or all three. He began to climb.

Rourke hauled himself up the ladder and out into the chaotic desert air. The wind buffeted him relentlessly, but as soon as he stepped fully out onto the train roof, he felt the feet of his suit anchor him to the surface. He heard a punch of pressurized air being released and saw four cables shoot from his suit to the surface of the train, a pair on each side, front and back. The cables attached to the metal skin of the train using electromagnets or spikes, Rourke could not tell. At least he felt somewhat secure.

Bear emerged from the hatch and safety cables shot out to anchor him on the roof. He stood up straight and put his hands on his hips, surveying the rush of air and sand. “Nice out, ain’t it?”

Rourke looked around them, and down at himself. He was crouched on the surface of the train, bent nearly double with his arms spread out for balance. He realized that it was his first time standing in the open air of Baraq. He began to laugh, a high, crazy cackle that filled his helmet and rang in his ears. “This is ludicrous!”

“That’s the spirit, kid! Now let’s get going.”

Rourke turned towards the rear of the train, putting the wind square at his back, and began to walk. As he moved forward, his aft cables released their hold on the train and retracted while two more shot out in Rourke’s direction of travel. The system repeated these steps automatically as he walked, ensuring that he was anchored firmly to the train.

“Slide your feet along and you can go faster; it’s safer that way,” Bear said through static and wind.

“This isn’t that bad after all.”

“No, it ain’t! Hell, it’s usually pretty fun if you’re just coming up to replace a static diffuser or antenna or something. Sandstorm and no brakes sort of kill the vibe.”

They carried on in silence for some time. The wind at Rourke’s back never relented, but lateral gusts were beginning to batter him about. He lost his footing just once, but his other boot held, along with his cables, and all he got was a skipped heartbeat. The gusts were increasing in strength, and visibility was decreasing rapidly. Rourke heard his breath becoming ragged and forced himself to huff in rhythm with his sliding feet.

“Look,” Bear said, “It’s getting hairier our here, so remember, if you take a spill and your helmet comes loose, rip the sucker off fast and get your back up mask on. The air won’t kill you out here, just thin, but the sand’ll hurt like hell, so--HRGH!”

Bear was abruptly cut off by a guttural tearing sound, and Rourke heard a series of loud pops and creaks over the comms. He looked over his shoulder just in time to see the senior engineer hurtling towards him, his safety cables slack and a dark metal pole sticking out of a crimson gash in his midsection. Rourke screamed as Bear’s body impacted him from behind, knocking him from his feet and carrying him over the side of the train.

Though he never lost consciousness as he careened from the top of the railcar, Rourke’s vision became a blur as he spun head over heels again and again. He saw his descent in snapshots. Bear’s corpse hurtled past in a streak of red, blood spraying out to clot with dust and grit.

Bear’s impact with the hardpan in a cloud of dust, a sickening twist of metal and bone, the train’s massive wheels, centimeters away, a glimpse of sparks across thousands of revolutions per second, the ground approaching, the grains of sand and bits of gravel growing larger, larger, larger, the brooding sky above as he flipped. Then he hit the ground at two hundred kilometers per hour and saw red.

The breath was knocked from his lungs and every joint was jolted as if with electricity. His suit’s collision system deployed a series of airbags, but he felt his helmet shatter with the impact. His ears were assaulted with raw wind and the sound of crunching gravel for a breath, then he was airborne again. Again, he slammed the ground, on his back. In the air once more, weightless, then crushed to ground. Twice more he bounced off the packed dirt before coming to rest beside the runaway train.

Moments spun themselves into eons as Rourke felt Baraq’s gravity crush his body close to its surface, squeezing the air out of his lungs. His suit was dead, and he could not breathe. One eye was glued shut, a crimson shadow, and the back of his neck buzzed with the tickle of adrenaline and points of broken glass. He knew these things in an abstract sense, but they did not inspire an emotional response. He simply lay there, diminished. Precious seconds ticked by like eons.

Almost imperceptibly, Rourke felt his one good eye drawn out into the desert. Through the billowing clouds of sand and whirling dust motes, he spied landmark thirty-nine: Thinking Rock. He saw it as he had in his dreams, from behind, and he felt it drawing him towards itself. The weight on his chest hampered him, and his leaden limbs were fastened to the ground. Then, the rock began to move.

Rourke’s heart fluttered. The boulder twisted, transformed, turned towards him and showed its new face. He saw a swirl of color, a distorted shape composed of smeared lines, a blob with two piercing eyes, both the color of a muddy sky shot through with flecks of slate. They blinked at him, pleaded with him, and when they had shed a single tear, Rourke sucked in a lungful of weak, sandy air.

The eyes disappeared in a flash, and Rourke found his face buried in gravel, the roar of Hamilcar-12 leaving him behind at top speed just behind his head. His oxygen-poor and sand-rich lungs burned and his heart pounded, and he had to press down with all his might just to roll onto his back. He scratched away the remains of his helmet and scrambled for his back-up mask, finding its tabs at the cowl of his suit and yanking it up over his head like a hood, fitting the protective lenses over his eyes and sealing the breathing apparatus over his face.

He guzzled in cool, clean air as his oxygen pressure kicked in. He jabbed the fingers of his left hand into his palm, mashing the suit’s manual reboot button to no avail. Remembering the batteries in his front pocket, he fought gravity and the stiff exosuit to grope about for the energy packs. He almost cried when he gripped the single undamaged battery, and he quickly clawed open the emergency power slot on his chest plate and jammed the battery home. Squeezing the reboot button twice more, he felt his suit come to life.

Though every fiber of his body screamed, he hauled himself upright with a whimper. The small display on his goggles flashed through a series of warning messages about blunt force trauma and emergency protocols, all of which he ignored. A stab of pain shot through his side, and he saw his own blood where a rock had pierced his suit. He fought to control his breath.

“Enter voice command mode,” he yelled into the wind.

A chime was supposed to sound in his helmet, but his helmet was spread out over a hundred meters of track. He cursed and silently prayed that voice command was working.

“Emergency medical protocol override, password Carolena. Inject morphine, 3 cc’s.”

He felt a prick in his upper thigh as an automatic syrette delivered the synthetic opiate, and he crowed his good fortune to the rushing wind. With relief coursing through his battered body, he turned his attention to the train rushing past just meters ahead. The mission, he thought. Stop the runaway train. No. Get back on the train, then stop it. He cursed himself for wasting time and began to assess.

Looking up the track, he could see the end of the train approaching at a terrible speed. He had to act, immediately, unless he wanted to be stranded in the desert, damning his would-be rescuers with a land-borne missile of raw tungsten ore aimed at the only spaceport on this side of Baraq. He searched his suit rapidly, looking for anything of use, finding to his great relief that his emergency containment harness was still attached to his suit.

Cinching down the straps, he found his way out. He spoke to his suit again. “Engage manual aiming system of emergency containment cables.”

A small crosshair appeared in his left eye, and he made a mental note to kiss the inventor of the device on the mouth if he ever made it home. He began to jog alongside the train with a lopsided step, as quickly as his injuries and the suit would allow. He aimed the crosshair squarely at the side of Hamilcar-12.

“Fire cables!”

Four anchor cables shot out and three made contact. Rourke felt a vicious yank and he was pulled from his feet, losing his breath once more. He was aboard the train again, flapping like a flea on its quivering flank, rattled about, attached by the torso to the skin of a hurtling metal beast.

He twisted his body around to face the side of the railcar, pressing his hands to the metal wall. The electromagnets engaged, and he slowly drew his feet under him, groaning in pain, until his boots made firm contact. He made himself small in the face of the wind and tremulously commanded the suit once more.

“Release anchor cables.”

They retracted and Rourke aimed upward.

“Fire cables.”

All four found purchase near the top of the car’s wall. An alarm dinged and Rourke saw that his oxygen was dangerously low.

“Retract cables.”

The cables began to retract, pulling him upwards until he could just reach the top of the car. He stretched up and gripped the roof, pulling himself up with shaky hands. Just as he swung a leg up, he lost his grip, falling downward against the cables with a sickening lurch. The anchor points held, and he sobbed weakly. Stretching again, he hauled himself up, getting a boot on the roof. After a groan and heave, he stook shakily atop the train once more.

“Resume automatic control of emergency containment cables.”

The cables shot out and anchored him to the roof. He advanced towards the rear of the train steadily, sliding his feet along in a shuffle as Bear had taught him. Bear. Bear, who was behind when he should have been in front. He forced himself to quell thoughts of the older man.

The red light of the caboose was in sight, and only a few cars remained to be crossed. Soon, the emergency battery light began to flash in Rourke’s eye, and his heart rate spiked as his emergency oxygen began to fail.

He pushed himself to a faster pace and felt pain return to his joints, his lungs afire and filled with alien grit. Just as he thought he could go no further, he looked down and saw the flickering red of the emergency hatch release tab. Kneeling, he pulled the metal lever and the roof beneath him fell inwards, depositing him unceremoniously into the auxiliary bridge of the caboose before retracting back into place.

Picking himself up slowly, he tore off his back-up mask and gulped the fresh air of the rear cabin. The corners of his vision began to close in as he staggered to the control panel. He ignored the blinking lights and blaring alarms and radio calls alike, laying both hands on the emergency brake. He pulled it with all his might, crashing backwards as his legs and focus gave out. The train began to slow with a banshee’s screech, and visions danced before him.

He saw a painting take shape, a swirl of color on a rippling canvas the color of bone. He saw himself, naked, leaking blood and hope onto the sand. Bear flew through the air, gripping the rail that protruded from his abdomen like a witch’s broom. Carolena was there, swimming in a blood red pool of moonlight. The images began to slow, fading to a haze of red-gray until all he could see was the color of a desert bathed in pale fire and purple gore. In his delirium, Rourke floated along, an inexorable quivering mass, even when the train stopped two hours later.

When he finally let go of the brake handle, collapsing onto his back, his hands were curled into fists and shaking with exertion. He struggled to remain conscious against heavy eyelids and gingerly began unfastening his suit. Exposing his chest to the cool air, he shuddered and spoke in a voice he barely knew, a thick, gray voice, choked with dust and bile.

“Connect to external communications, emergency broadcast channel one. This is Hamilcar-12. Bear is gone. Train stopped somewhere between Thinking Rock and Folly’s End. High iron. Red flag all traffic, red flag. Bear is gone, and I’m in the back; Rourke, I’m in the caboose; we had to go over the top, but Bear fell. I fell, but I had to pull the air, and we just stopped. I just stopped. Medic, please, I’m so, so sorry.”

Rourke began coughing uncontrollably, spitting blood and grit and continuing his drowsy monotone. “When I fell down and hit the rock, saw her face in the cloud and climbed back up in so many colors, brown and brown and gray and brown and red and, and brown and....” Rourke’s eyelids fluttered shut, and he wandered in the dark.

* * *

Rourke’s one-hundredth run with Hamilcar-12 could only come after a mandatory leave period of three months, minimum, as much for his healing as for the repair and testing of the locomotive. After four months in his quarters, weaning himself off Fun-Gum and sketching out tortured landscapes, his mind became filled with a desire for dust-ripped plains that his paintings could not assuage. He signed up for a physical and psych eval, passing both with flying colors, and strode down to the railyard sober as anything. Upon arriving, he found that he had been promoted and set out on run one hundred as a senior engineer, to the stirring applause of the yard crew.

As the train flew along the track, Rourke counted off each landmark in turn, pointing them out to his new engineer-in-training as they passed. When they rushed past a monument set back from the tracks by a few hundred meters, Rourke took out his little book and added landmark number seventy-three: Bear’s Bier.

Shortly after passing the memorial, they rushed past landmark thirty-nine. Rourke peered out the window and studied the boulder for a moment before scratching out its name in the notebook. In the time he had been away, the likeness of a face had been worn smooth.