Kevin Anderson - Ill Wind

“Todd—where are you going?” Iris’s dark eyes widened.

“Out. Away from… from this .”

“Todd!”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be back. That’s a promise,” he growled and stomped outside.

The door slammed by itself, and he heard Iris calling, “Wait!” But her words were cut off by the smack of the door, which sounded like a gunshot in the darkness. Todd walked off. He considered taking one of the horses to Tracy, where Casey Jones and his steam train waited. But he knew the commune would need Ren and Stimpy—and they’d be safe here, just like Alex Kramer would have wanted. He went off on foot into the moonlit night.

Inside the refurbished dining car of the steam train, Captain Miles Uma, formerly of the Oilstar Zoroaster , relaxed and pondered the night. Used for storage, the dining car now carried crates of ripening fruits and vegetables, nuts, and other produce. The odors mingled in the tight space.

Rex O’Keefe and the Gambotti brothers kept to themselves in the passenger car; Uma didn’t mind. Once Uma had gained their confidence, they did what they were told, as if they were happy that someone had finally stepped up and taken charge, accepted some responsibility. Like any good captain, Uma treated them with respect—and now that they had order back in their lives, they didn’t mind the work.

Uma cracked open two of the narrow windows to let the night breeze in. Outside, the sleeping city of Tracy was dark, save for the fires of a few late-night people; everyone else bedded down with the fall of darkness.

By the flickering light of a stubby beeswax candle, Uma dipped his fingers in a bowl of tepid water, took a bar of soap and lathered his face and head. He removed a long, sharp straight-razor, propped a small mirror up against the inner wall of the train where he could see his reflection, then began to shave by candlelight. First, to hone his attention, he shaved his eyebrows; then he worked at his beard stubble, and finally scraped his head, shaving the back by feel alone.

It made him feel clean, and renewed and different. He wished he could slice away the pounding guilt as easily.

Guiding a train along the abandoned tracks was very different from captaining an enormous supertanker like the Zoroaster . But it kept him moving and gave him some way to stop the clamoring depression; Rex O’Keefe and the others were swept along with his dream. Uma found that by focusing on a task, he could stop thinking about the wreck against the Golden Gate Bridge….

As everything fell apart, Uma had wandered north from San Francisco, changing his name, fearing that someone might recognize him. Uma had been doing a good job of blaming himself. He worked odd jobs, trying to run from himself and watching with a growing anguish as things grew worse. Until he stumbled across the train station in Napa Valley.

Uma finished shaving and blew out the candle, feeling his way to an empty, comfortable seat in the refurbished dining car. He was exhausted, not from the work that he did to keep the wood piled in the furnace, but from being sociable tonight.

He didn’t enjoy social occasions, but the people had prepared a meal for them, wanting to talk for hours, until Uma and the others had finally gone back to the train. He had tried to answer most of their questions, but it got tiresome after a while.

In the morning at dawn, just as he was struggling to awaken from his cramped sleeping space on the dining car bench, Uma snapped his eyes open when he heard a rapping on one of the half-open windows.

“Hey, Casey Jones, you in there?” Uma wrenched his stocky body into a sitting position and blinked out at a tall cowboy. “I want to join your group,” the cowboy said. “I think you need another person.”

Uma went stiffly to the window of the dining car, not welcoming the man inside. The cowboy walked over with a large nervous grin on his face and stuck his hand through the open window.

“I’m Todd Severyn, pleased to meet you.” Uma shook his hand warily. The cowboy looked strong, but troubled circles surrounded his red-rimmed eyes. Grass stains splotched his pants. “I walked all night long just to get here.”

“We could maybe use some help, “ Uma said, “but it’s a backbreaking job. You sure it’s worth it to you?”

“It depends on your priorities.” Todd’s gruff answer seemed to speak to more than just the question Uma had asked. “I got my reasons.”

Uma stepped aside just enough to let the cowboy onto the train. “Don’t we all?”

Five miles south of General Bayclock’s Manzano Mountain headquarters, a field of mirrors spread across three acres. Though gaps separated the three-foot mirrors, the reflected glare gave the impression of a seamless plain of molten silver.

The suggestion to use Sandia Albuquerque’s abandoned solar test project to generate electricity sounded like a good idea, but Bayclock wanted to see the apparatus himself.

The computer-controlled mirrors were designed to rotate, follow the sun and focus the blinding rays on a three-story concrete tower. The intense illumination heated a special vessel to generate steam that would turn turbines and produce power. Now the mirrors stood frozen in place, useless without hourly brute-force manual adjustment. It would take years to polish the mothballed mirrors back to the accuracy needed for optimal focus.

The scientific pinheads didn’t have the common sense to engineer anything practical , Bayclock thought as he scowled at the useless apparatus. No allowance for contingencies. They reveled in the nifty toys they built and patted each other on the back. The general held little hope that refurbishing this system would be anything more than a futile effort. He had seen enough. He strode through the field of mirrors, back to where his horse waited with the armed escort.

The woman who headed up Sandia’s energy research program—Bayclock had already forgotten her name—trailed after him. She looked as overbearing as the number of programs she had once managed. At just over six feet tall and weighing close to 200 pounds, she rivaled Bayclock in size; her big butt and flabby arms implied a contempt for her own physical health. Her ragtag group of scientists followed as she kept up with Bayclock, step by step.

“You want the electricity, we’ll deliver. It’s a simple matter of granting us access to the dry lubricants. I guarantee we can have part of the mirror field up and running at minimal levels within a week. Replacing the seals comes next. And after that, eighteen months to optimize the mirrors. No problem.”

Bayclock reached the edge of the mirror maze. His executive officer and three armed guards waited on their own horses. Bayclock said, “You told me this field was computer controlled. How are you going to synchronize the mirrors’ movements to the sun without computers?”

The woman waved her hands while she talked, as if pointing at an equation-strewn whiteboard. “We’d need less than a hundred people, each physically positioning ten mirrors apiece.”

Bayclock snorted. “A hundred people out in the sun everyday? While you’re polishing mirrors? That’s an awful lot of work to get a hundred kilowatts of power. Intelligence reports that’s ten times less than the White Sands group can deliver!”

The Sandia woman put her hands on her hips. “That’s a hundred kilowatts more than you have right now! And it’s a lot fewer people than you use to chase kids after curfew. What’s more important?”

Bayclock walked away, ignoring her. She grabbed him by the elbow. “Look, General, you wanted a way to generate electricity. We can do it. It’s not much, but it’s a start.”