China Mieville - Railsea

Now here came a train, racing for them with clear intent. “You’ve done it now!” Caldera repeated. Local brigands, she thought, a ferocious compact battletrain from insular nearby islands full, myth had it, of monstrosities & prodigies, trains that ran backwards through time. & who, it seemed, had either heard of the Shroakes, or greeted all incomers in so pugnacious a fashion.

“You’ve been & gone & done it now!” Caldera shouted, & shoved forward the levers, which did nothing anymore.

Once they would have outrun such an enemy without bothering to break off from sandwiches & backgammon. Now their locomotive wheezed & lurched like a moribund mule. Dero switched & the pursuers gained. Their diesel growl grew louder.

A last push, another throttle. Caldera held her breath.

She heard a cannon fire. She closed her eyes. But nothing hit them. The train drummed under a rain of earth.

“Cal,” Dero said.

A fusillade of missiles was slamming into the attack-train on their tail. Rocks, arrows, small-arms fire. Nothing devastating, but enough to mess with, to confound & hurt the wildland attackers, who scrambled to turn their weapons towards this new threat.

Windblown carts! Switching & track-riding with skills a delight to see; tacking in gusts from line to line; firing catapults, slingshots, crossbows, pistols; in & out again. & here, bearing down by its sailing companions, on the brigand-train switching lines, came a moletrain. A moletrain, miles, miles & miles from any moldywarpe runs.

The sailing carriages scattered, firing as they went. The moler came in fast. Its harpoon guns were levelled. It faced the attacker, on the same track, heading straight for them. Caldera shook her head. “What are they doing ?” she whispered. Even a moler in top shape was no match for these local warlords. Thanks very much for saving us , Caldera thought. I wish you weren’t about to die . She counted down seconds till impact. Ten , she thought. Nine. Eight .

But no: it was a well-judged challenge. The brigands flinched. A switch & they were slaloming out of the moler’s path. To where ground suddenly jumped like an animal provoked.

Up came a grinding machine. Breaching all manner of railsea taboos, a subterrain smashed through the ties themselves , buckled the rails & sent the pirate train into the air & crashing down.

The moler slowed. The trainsfolk watched. The pirates wailed. Dust was spraying. There was a silence. Then: “Come on, we got ’em!”

The Shroakes knew that voice. Caldera grabbed Dero’s arm. On the roof of the moler’s engine a young man stood.

“Wait now,” Dero said, “is it, you don’t know …” But Caldera was whooping. The figure hefted a clumsy pistol. He waved at her.

He stared through yards of air over yards of rails through the window of her own poor battered vehicle, right into Caldera Shroake’s poor tired eyes. With another whoop like a siren, like a train sounding triumph at a journey well done, at an arrival, Caldera leaned out & waved back. At the same moment, each on their own train, she & the newcomer, Sham ap Soorap, smiled.

BLOOD RABBIT

(Lepus cruentus)

Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society .

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 7.1)

NONE OF YOU HAVE TO,” SHAM SAID. “I DON’T EVEN expect any of you to. I don’t deserve you to. But yeah, of course I’m going on.” He smiled. “With them.”

Caldera smiled, too. Thanks , she mouthed at him.

Of those Bajjer who had stuck the journey this far, most took their own leave after the Fight of the Rescue of the Siblings Shroake. Now the Shroakes were—temporarily at least—saved. A quest, for something that lay beyond pictures the Bajjer & their companions had never even seen, was the only reason to go on. Most of the Bajjer had little interest in quests. There were exceptions. & there were those insistent on revenge on the Manihiki navy train the Shroakes told them was close.

The crew of the Medes , that had once been a moletrain & was now who-knew-quite-what, having performed the rescue they had promised to Sham, were no more obliged to continue than the Bajjer. The captain, if such she still was, fiddled with her tracker.

“I’ll stick with you a bit, though, if you’ve no objection,” Sirocco said.

“Ah,” said Vurinam. “We’re so near now. Why not let’s just see what we find?”

He spoke for the bulk of the crew. Those for whom he did not joined the mass of Bajjer carts, complaining at the unorthodox conveyance, to start a slow way back east to the known world.

“Captain Naphi?” Sham said. She looked up, startled. She still prodded at her tracking mechanism, with a tool extruded from her arm. The one her crew now called her artificial artificial one.

“Should throw that bloody thing to Mocker-Jack,” Fremlo muttered.

“I stay with my train,” Naphi said at last, turned back to what she was doing. So there was that.

Those heading back & those going on separated with camaraderie & without rancour, waving as they parted. The flotilla of sailtrains scattered back towards distant mountains.

The investigators argued over their clue-map. “What’s this sound like?” someone would shout, & yellingly repeat the description Sham, with muttered help from the captain, had given. Then debates: that looks like such-&-such a place; no, you’re mad, that’s wossname; & wasn’t there a story about these or those hills? Bajjer scout-carts would beetle off in candidate directions, until forward motion was agreed, & the Medes , the remaining Bajjer vehicles & the Pinschon hauled on.

Dero & Caldera watched their own train disappear behind them. Their rolling-stock home for so long. “You had to,” Sham said quietly. “It was falling apart.” For a while, neither Shroake said a word.

“Thanks for letting us carry on,” Dero said at last. “For using your train.” Ain’t really mine , Sham thought. He left the Shroakes to their goodbye.

The captain, at the Medes ’s rear, intent in her strange work, gave a hm of triumph. Daybe veered overhead. The air so far out seemed to confuse it. It arced, abruptly curved back towards the train. Heading not straight for Sham but for the last carriage. Circled Captain Naphi, standing staring back the way they had come, towards her lost philosophy, like some befuddled antifigurehead. No one bothered her. No one minded her in her backwards command. She fiddled with her machine while the bat circled.

There was salvage even here, & once or twice they saw the remnants of ruined trains. They made slow progress—there were days when they decided they’d taken a wrong move, & the whole group would reverse, or grind on to where junctions allowed them to turn. But they grew better at unpicking clues. Their false starts grew fewer.

They had, after all, a method for knowing when they’d gone right: with a hush & increasingly uncanny sense, Sham would find himself, with a sudden turn of the rails, staring at an exact scene he remembered from the screen. Only the sky would be different, the clouds & upsky coilings. They progressed through old pictures.

The farther they travelled beyond the trade routes of the railsea, filling in specifics on charts marked only with the vaguest rumours, the sparser the railsea, the larger the stretches of unbroken land, the fewer the rails. There was a winnowing of iron possibilities.