The Last Girl on the Rails - Iron Rail Hunt

Basalt dust had a way of turning into greasy black paste the second it hit steam exhaust, coating the double-paned observation viewports until the world outside looked like it was being viewed through the bottom of a scratched beer bottle.

Tess stood at the map table in Carriage 01, her sleeves pushed up past the meteoric iron bracers on her forearms, using an oily rag to scrub a clean circle through the soot. Outside, the Obsidian Trench was doing its best to swallow the train whole. The canyon walls rose six hundred feet on either side―sheer, vertical slabs of volcanic glass and slick, black basalt that crowded so close to the roadbed you could have reached out an emergency hatch with a six-foot rake and scraped moss off the stone.

There were only three tracks running through the bottom of the gorge. Three parallel lines of heavy manganese steel laid across rotted cedar ties, separated by barely fifteen yards of crushed ballast and stagnant drainage ditches choked with black sludge.

“Track switch in four miles,” Bridget Foxworth called out from the forward engineer’s bench, her single right arm hauling back on a brass mechanical quadrant lever with a dry, ratcheting clatter. The empty sleeve of her canvas overall was pinned flat against her ribs, her jaw clamped tight around a dead wooden matchstick. “Main line narrows down to a single throat at the Obsidian Siphon. If someone’s running a heavy rake behind us, that’s where they’re going to drop the block.”

“They aren’t dropping a block,” Tess said, not looking up from the CRT monitor on the shelf.

Channel 1 was still broadcasting in erratic, green-tinted cathode pulses. The meteorological radar had collapsed into a localized tactical scan, projecting three glowing amber vectors sliding along the lower third of the glass tube. Two miles behind their rear coupler, riding Track 02 at eighty-five miles an hour, was a massive, heat-bloated radar signature shaped like an iron wedge.

The Kraken.

The pirate dreadnought had peeled off from the European sector pack forty minutes after clearing the Grand Convergence Station. It wasn’t hauling freight, it wasn’t running supply contracts, and it hadn’t stopped at the intermediate water towers to replenish its tender. It was burning high-grade anthracite mixed with crude bitumen, throwing off a rooster-tail of black, unburned carbon that showed up on the radar like a brushfire.

“They’re gaining nine hundred yards every three minutes,” Arlo Finch muttered, pacing between the scrap-smelting forge and the bathroom partition. He was holding his four-foot threaded steel rebar in both hands, his knuckles white, his oversized army parka flapping around his shins like laundry on a fence. “We should’ve bought those landmines from the Baltic dealer, Ortiz. I told you three times on Siding 14. Ten landmines dropped off the back platform, boom, no more pirate problem.”

“Those mines were forty percent wet chalk, Arlo,” Gavin Ortiz growled from beneath the floor hatch by the secondary battery bank.

The blacksmith shoved his head up into the cabin, his hair matted with black grease, a heavy steel crescent wrench gripped in his calloused fist. He wiped a streak of sweat from his chin with his shoulder, breathing heavily. “You drop forty pounds of unstable nitro-chalk out the rear vestibule at seventy miles an hour, the backdraft sucks the blast straight into our own rear axle. Then we’re sitting on three wheels in a dark canyon while sixty raiders climb through the floorboards with angle grinders.”

Gavin hauled himself out of the hatch, kicked the iron cover shut with a hollow BANG, and walked over to the workbench to grab an oil can.

“How’s the fluid-metal bond on the rear skirts?” Tess asked, her voice going to that quiet, rhythmic register she used when a dispatch board was five minutes from collapsing.

“Cured solid,” Gavin grunted, squirting two drops of mineral oil into the pivot hinge of his arming sword scabbard. “The catalyst we bought at the auction wove the gold alloy straight through the void-plate pores. The side armor will absorb three direct harpoon strikes before the plate even starts to deform. But the roof on Carriage 02 is thin, Tess. The greenhouse glass has ballistic laminates, but if they drop boarding ramps from five feet above us, the kinetic shock is going to shatter the aluminum framing and dump three tons of scrap into Elyse’s vegetable troughs.”

As if summoned by her name, Lady Elyse Brandt stepped through the connecting bulkhead hatch from the greenhouse car.

The noblewoman looked like she had just come from an afternoon stroll through a manicured orchard, completely untouched by the grease and panic vibrating through the iron cabin. She was carrying a clean wooden bowl filled with dark red strawberries and fresh mint leaves, her dark hair pinned back with her usual copper cotter pins, her narrow rapier sheathed neatly inside the hollow frame of her parasol.

“The radishes have taken the new irrigation mist exceptionally well,” Elyse reported, setting the bowl down on the corner of the map table with delicate precision. “The nitrogen balance is stable. It would be a profound aesthetic tragedy if a collection of unwashed cutthroats were permitted to track coal slurry across my fresh clover beds.”

Finch stared at the strawberries, blinked his large rabbit-eyes twice, and gave a strangled, piping wheeze. “We’re about to get rammed by a four-hundred-ton dreadnought, lady! They’ve got pneumatic harpoons the size of telephone poles, and you’re worried about your damn clover?”

“Clover fixes nitrogen in the soil, Master Finch,” Elyse replied, without looking at him, picking up a single strawberry and inspecting the stem with calm aristocratic detachment. “Without nitrogen, you will be eating raw flour mixed with engine grease by next Tuesday. A person who does not respect the soil does not deserve to survive the crossing.”

A sound like an iron church bell falling off a cliff tore through the floorboards.

It wasn’t a horn. It was a steam-siren―a high-pressure, dual-toned mechanical shriek that echoed off the basalt canyon walls, multiplying until it sounded like five trains were bearing down on them from the darkness.

Tess reached down, her right hand closing around the rubber-wrapped hilt of The Crescent Cleaver resting against the table rack.

“They’re on Track 03,” Bridget shouted from the cab, her single arm spinning the directional ballista control wheel three turns to the right. “Coming up on our starboard flank! Three hundred yards and closing!”

Tess stepped to the right-side ballistic viewport, pulled the steel blast-shutter back half an inch, and looked out into the canyon.

Emerging from the swirling sulfur mist on the parallel track forty yards away was a nightmare of industrial violence.

The Kraken.

The dreadnought was colossal―four articulated units long, its lead locomotive built like a wedge-shaped iron battering ram plated in six-inch naval steel salvaged from sunken cruisers, painted in a peeling, matte-crimson primer that looked like dried scab tissue. Its twelve massive drive wheels were churning against the manganese rails with deafening, earth-shaking thunder, throwing showers of white-hot sparks ten feet into the drainage ditches.

Mounted along the roofline of the dreadnought’s second car was a rotating steel platform carrying four heavy, pneumatic harpoon cannons, their six-foot barbed steel darts glistening with dark grease.

Standing behind the forward harpoon battery were eight men in heavy leather welding aprons, charcoal respirators, and spiked steel helmets, their hands resting on hydraulic release levers.

On the open bridge above the engine cab stood the captain―a hulking, one-eyed brute with a scarred bald head and a four-foot pneumatic boarding axe slung across his back. He raised a bullhorn to his mouth, his voice booming across the thirty-yard gap between the roaring locomotives:

“HEAVE TO, LITTLE BOXCAR! DROP YOUR AIR BRAKES AND UNCOUPLE THE GREENHOUSE, OR WE’LL TEAR YOUR BOGIES OFF THE RAILS AND LEAVE YOUR CARCASS IN THE DITCH!”

Finch grabbed the edge of the map table, his face turning the color of wet chalk. “Tess… he wants the greenhouse car. He saw the chimney smoke from the Convergence Station.”

“Nobody touches Carriage 02,” Tess said. Her voice was so quiet, so level, that it seemed to drop beneath the roar of the two trains.

She turned to Gavin. “Is the roof ballista loaded?”

“Forty armor-piercing conch bolts in the auto-feeder,” Gavin nodded, his hand resting on the manual firing lanyard hanging from the ceiling hatch. “Sighted dead level at twenty yards.”

“Bridget, hold the throttle at seventy-two,” Tess ordered, pulling the meteoric iron bracers tighter on her forearms. “Don’t accelerate, don’t brake. Let them pull alongside until their boarding bridge aligns with our mid-car seam.”

“They’re firing!” Bridget yelled, slamming her foot onto the secondary floor brace.

THWUMP-THWUMP-THWUMP.

Three heavy pneumatic cannons on The Kraken discharged simultaneously.

Three six-foot steel harpoons, trailing thick, two-inch braided steel cables wrapped in barbed wire, whistled across the thirty-yard void between the tracks at four hundred feet per second.

The first harpoon struck The Rust Bastion’s forward wheel guard.

The guard took the hit and gave nothing back.

The four-inch composite void-plate held. The hardened fluid-metal lattice underneath instantly crystallized, absorbing the kinetic shock with a bright amber flare, deflecting the barbed head into the ballast gravel where it skittered uselessly against the ties.

The second and third harpoons struck higher.

The two barbed darts tore straight through the heavy sheet-metal eaves of Carriage 02’s roofline, their three-inch spring-loaded steel barbs expanding inside the structural framing with a sickening sound of twisting iron.

A high-pitched, metallic whine tore through the greenhouse as the heavy winches on The Kraken’s deck engaged.

The two steel cables snapped taut as iron rods, humming with terrifying tension.

The immense lateral drag of the four-hundred-ton dreadnought pulled The Rust Bastion sideways, tilting the left-side wheels two inches off the manganese rails with an agonizing, high-frequency scream of tortured metal. Inside Carriage 01, three tin mugs fell off the shelf, water sloshing across the floorboards, while the radish bowl slid six feet across the map table before smashing against the bulkhead.

“They’re winching us in!” Finch screamed, dropping to his knees to keep from sliding into the forge hearth. “The left bogie is lifting! If we hit a switch with the wheels in the air, we’re gonna flip!”

From the deck of The Kraken, four heavy hydraulic rams hissed.

A massive, twenty-foot steel boarding ramp―studded with four-inch iron spikes and fitted with magnetic locking clamps―slammed down across the gap between the careening trains, bridging the thirty yards of roaring, spark-filled darkness.

The door met the jamb and the whole car rang.

The magnetic clamps seized The Rust Bastion’s roof gutter, locking the two moving fortresses together in an unholy, grinding embrace at seventy miles an hour.

Ten leather-clad pirate boarders, armed with heavy pneumatic boarding axes, sawed-off shotguns, and electric arc-cutters, surged onto the ramp, their spiked boots hammering across the steel tread with bloodthirsty roars:

“TAKE THE HATCH! SLIT THEIR THROATS AND STRIP THE GREENHOUSE TO THE BOARDS!” Tess looked at Elyse.

The noblewoman had already discarded her parasol shroud, the four-foot willow-thin rapier gleaming with pale silver light in her right hand, her grey eyes completely calm, completely lethal.

“Roof hatch,” Tess said, kicking the iron ladder down from the ceiling. “We take the bridge.”