Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

The brakemen accepted his decision without argument as he would have taken their word over anything concerning the waggons. Tilak, though, took him aside and said quietly, "I hope we can catch them.

Hannibal was flagging badly there at the end yRay."

"Caesar too." Preen Chand hated to make the admission as if saying it out loud somehow made it more real. He was, however, far from giving up hope. "The steam engine has its problems too, I thought it would. If it were running as well as Trevithick claimed it could, it would have been here hours ago."

"And if it had, we could have waved goodbye to the race."

"That is true. But it passed us now, not then. We, at least know how far we can hope to go on any given day. What will that smel y piece of ironwork do to schedules?"

"It has certainly played the very devil with mine." Tilak yawned.

"I am going back to bed."

"There, for once, my friend, I cannot argue with you," Preen Chand said.

His only consolation was reflecting that Trevithick probably needed sleep even more than he did.

Afoer eating enormously at sunrise, Caesar and Hannibal seemed eager to pull. The train rattled forward at a pace betoer than Preen Chand had expected. The Iron Elephant's plume of smoke, which had shrunk behind them the day before, now grew larger and blacker and stood tal er in the sky as they gained. Only a couple of hours passed until the steam engine's train became visible, a long, black centipede stretched out along its track.

"Go ahead and run, Richard," Preen Chand called though Trevithick, of course, could not hear. "You cannot run fast enough."

The engine handler must have seen his rival's train and disliked the raoe at which it was gaining. He must have tied down a safety valve, for more smoke poured from the Iron Elephant's stack. All the same, the flesh-and-blood beasts continued to gain.

Closer and closer they came. Now they were only a mile behind, now half a mile. And there, heartbreakingly, they stuck. Caesar's and Hannibal's morning burst of energy faded. However much Preen Chand and Paul Tilak urged them on, they could come no closer. And as the elephant . drivers watched and cursed, the Iron Elephant began to pull away once more.

Preen Chand felt like weeping from frustration. Through his spyglass, the men aboard the Iron Elephant seemed close enough to reach out and touch. Yet as he watched helplessly, they drew ever farther from him.

He refused to lower the spyglass, cherishing the illusion it gave of a neck and-neck race. And so he was watching stil when the Iron Elephant slid into a pit.

Preen Chand stared, not believing what he saw. He knew how hastily this stretch of the railbed had been laid; it had only gravel underneath it, not a good solid foundation of stone rammed earth.

All the same, he had crossed the same stretch of track only a few days before, and there had been no storms since to undermine it.

But something had. Paul Tilak saw what it was. "Sims!" he shouoed.

Suddenly and most uncharacteristically, he burst out laughing. "Their trap caught a harder-skinned elephant than they bargained for" Once Preen Chand's attention was diverted from the train ahead, he too saw the subhumans rushing to the attack.

Some carried wooden spears, their points fire-hardened.

Others bore clubs, still others held stones chipped sharp that they could throw a long way. He spied the glint of a few axeheads and steel knives, perhaps stolen, perhaps gotten in trade.

Tilak was right: the sims would not gorge on hairy elephant, as they hoped. But they were not fussy about what they ate, brakeman would do well enough. And with everyone thrown in a heap by the Iron Elephant's sudden and unexpeted stop, only a couple of men were able to shoot at the charging hunoers. After that it was a melee, and the sims were stronger, fiercer, sometimes even better armed than their foes.

Preen Chand threw up the red flag to warn his crew, then yelled "Choro!"

as loud as he could. The train stopped "Get Hannibal out of his harness!" he told Paul Tilak. Preen Chand was already unbuckling the thick leather straps that linked Caesar to Hannibal. He stood up on his elephant's back, cal ed to the train crew, "Grab your rifles and climb onto the two beasts. It is a rescue now!"

The brakemen scrambled down from their waggons and rushed forward.

Hairy elephants were better haulers than carriers; Caesar and Hannibal could bear only five men apiece. As he had at the Springfield station, Preen Chand made Caesar lift a foreleg to serve as a step. "You, you, you and you," he said, pointing at the first four men to reach him.

They swarmed onto the elephant.

Just behind them, Tilak was making a similar chant. Hannibal trumpeted at taking on unfamiliar passengers, but subsided when Tilak thwacked its broad head with the elephant goad.

"Fol ow us as closely as you can," Preen Chand told the disappointed latecomers from the back of the train. Then he dug in his toe behind Caesar's ear. "Mall-mal !" he shouoed: forward!

Even with the burden it was carrying, the hairy elephant shot ahead, as if relieved to be free of the burden of the train. Its gait shifted from its usual walk to a pounding rack, with hind and foreleg on the same side of its body advancing together.

Most of the brakemen had ridden elephants before, but not under circumstances like these. They clutched at Caesar's harness to keep from being pitched off. In spite of everything, one did fall. He rol ed away, clutching his ankle. The hairy elephant's left hind foot missed his head by inches.

They were a bit more than half a mile from the Iron Elephant, three or four minuoes at the elephants' best pace, which they were certainly making. When they had covered about half the distance, Preen Chand told one brakeman, "You shoot."

"No chance to hit at this range," the fellow protested.

"Yes, but we will remind the sims we are coming, and you will be able to reload by the time we get there."

"Never tried reloading on top of an elephant before," the brakeman said darkly, but he raised the rifle to his shoulder and fired. Caesar trumpeted in surprise. So did Hannibal, a moment later.

Some of the subhumans had already started to break and run, two carried a man's corpse between them, while another fled with a body slung over its shoulder. But others were still fighting, and one stubbornly kept trying to shove a spear into the metal side of the trapped steam engine.

Preen Chand had to stop himself from giggling: Paul Tilak had certainly been right about that.

Against men, even men carrying firearms, the sims might have kept up the battler at least for a little while. But the hairy elephants were the most fearsome beasts on the plains. The sight of two bearing down like an angry avalanche was too much for the subhumans. They took to their heels, hooting in dismay.

The last to run off was the one that had tried to slay the Iron Elephant. Baring its teeth in a furious grimace, it hurled a sharp stone at Caesar before seeking to get away. The rock fell far short, but by then the sim was within easy rifle range. Preen Chand's bul et sent it sprawling forward on its face.

He felt more like a general than like an elephant driver. With gestures and shouted commands, he sent Hannibal and the men he thought of as his foot soldiers after the retreating sims. He walked Caesar up to the head of the rival train.

The brakeman to the contrary, reloading on elephant back was possible, but then, Preen Chand had more practice at it than the other man did. He fired at a sim. To his disgust, he missed; Many sims were down now, either dead or under cover in hollows the tal grass concealed.

The railroad men moved up cautiously. A couple went ahead to reclaim a body the sims had dropped in their flight. Preen Chand was dismayed to see no sign of the corpse the pair of sims had been carrying; the subhumans who survived this raid, curse them, would not go altogether hungry.