Who told you? she had wanted to shout at the receding train. And who told them? Who did the dirt? The Ninth Avata people, fair enough: I did the dirt on them. Child’a’grace, my own Catherine of Tharsis? My own train. Marya Stuard—she’d be up to it, she’s never got on with us—she’s always thought we thought we were better than her—and she’s got this reputation for mean to protect. She can take out the Starke dacoits, she can put my name about quick as a knife. But that’d be like a direct attack on the Engineers. It’d be one end of the train against the other. Not even she’d be mean enough to start a civil war. But someone certainly did, so who? Oh no. They couldn’t. Could they? They could: if Da’s proud enough not to talk to Ma because of a card game four years ago, he could dirt me. Sle’s petty enough but he’s too lazy even to start a rumour. If it’s my own people, I’m really shafted. I really can’t go back again. But what’s to go back to? They’ll just work up another contract and it’ll be me with the paper money all over my dress all over again, only this Joe won’t even have a stainless steel kitchen. Mother’a’plenty, they might even fix me with a Bassareeni, just to punish me. I’ll never get my hands on the throttles. So what’s to go back for? Make a life out here, off the track. Lots of people do. Most people do. Hell, I’m a weird ethnic minority, most people can’t even imagine how we live the way we do. It’s probably a darn sight easier, maybe even better. Friends would be easier to keep. You wouldn’t have your friends and family and work-mates all the same people. You wouldn’t work with your family. You wouldn’t have them around all the time. That would be good. You could get away. But imagine waking up and it’s the same place every day. You’d be stuck with the seasons. And you’d really never ever ever get to drive. Their way, maybe. Not likely, but it’s a possibility. This way, nada. And you wouldn’t be track. You’d be a passenger. Every time you got on a train, you’d know there’d be someone up there at the front with their hand on the drive bar, taking you where you’re going to. You’d just be going along for the ride. Hell, I’m an Engineer! I’m not driven, I drive. I drive.
So: here’s this story, and this is where it’s left me. It sure can’t mean for everything to end like this. Whatever happened to happy ever after? No, think, hey, doesn’t every story have a time like this, when everything’s been burned down and levelled and things are as bad as they can get for our heroine?
So, in this time of levelling, what does a heroine do?
She gets up. She picks up her pack and slings it on her back. She turns to face the place she is going. She says, If everything is ashes and flat, on this I can build. This is the lowest of the low. Every way now is up. So go. Nothing here for you. You’ll get where you’re going.
She got up. She slung her pack on her back. She turned to face up the line. She felt no stronger, no surer, no more determined, no less hungry/ thirsty/grubby/tired but she could not remain another minute by that trackside. She walked out of that flat field of ashes.
By noon she had still neither eaten nor drunk, but a wind rose behind her that cooled her and carried her forward, and early in the afternoon there was the space battle.
At least, Sweetness presumed it was a space battle, in that part of it clearly did come from space, though the action was low to middle atmospheric. It was all rather confusing and done so quick that if you had not been looking you would have missed it, and even if you were, you could still not be sure what had happened. Trudging along the upline toward the beckoning skeleton of a water tower, Sweetness had become aware of a distant low howl behind her. She spun in the instant it took that howl to become a devouring roar as three World Defence ionospheric interceptors streaked out from behind the far rim rocks and thundered over her head.
“Wooo!” she yelled into the shatter of engines, and whirled to see the interceptors rise on their parallel white contrails into a sky-scourging loop. They were magnificently evolved devices, utterly of their native element, arrogant of gravity in their spindly, insectoid asymmetry. They spun as one on their long axes as they reached the top of the loop, then rolled on to their backs for a hair-raising tumble through fifty kilometres of airspace. When the zenith blazed with crackling lilac beams, the point interceptor exploded immediately in a white fireball. Numbstruck, Sweetness watched the flaming fragments draw streamers of smoke down to impact beyond the southern horizon. She could not register what she had seen. It was all lights and smokes and mystery, as beautiful and remote as sacred theatre. She found the remaining two aerospacecraft against the blue. They had shaken off their vain aerobatics and were screaming down on divergent courses, hoping to bemuse the targeting computers among the dunes and rocks. Lilac sky-beams flickered again; Sweetness saw a searing arc slash across the southern stone plains, strike the fleeing fighter amidships, cut it cleanly, thoughtlessly, in two. Severed halves went tumbling over each other, bounding high, disintegrating into chunks of burning scrap. A sheet of flame went up from the line of impact as the jumble of high technology struck sand. The third interceptor came scorching round on a tight turn from the west, headed back to whatever base had launched it. It bore down on Sweetness, jumped the mainline with a hypersonic boom that beat her inner organs like a drum and headed north. High in heaven, lilac beams criss-crossed like a master carver steeling his blade. A single lilac scimitar cut down. Presciently warned, the interceptor had veered on an erratic manoeuvre, otherwise it would have been cleanly vaporised. Not enough: the partac beam clipped a stabiliser vane. Too low, too fast. The pilot fought for stability but gravity fought harder. The interceptor jerked, heaved, veered, flipped on to its side and ploughed into the slip-slope of a sif dune in a kilometres-long plume of sand. A titanic pillar of fire went up from the northern dunefields. Seconds later, the blast front buffeted Sweetness. Heat washed her face, she reeled, regained balance.
Oily black smoke spiralled up into the sky.
“Woof,” said Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th. “That was freaky.”
A few footsteps along, the chill hit her out of the desert heat: she had seen flash machines, swift technology, war by special effects budget. Under all that chrome there had been crew, people really dying bad, arbitrary and meaningless deaths out there with no other witness but herself and God. She had watched their final struggles, their skills and talents strive and fail. Real death, not story death. No trainperson is a stranger to death: Sweetness did not doubt that the majority of those freeloaders she had djubba-ed from the top of the train had either perished immediately or slowly as a result of her action. This was grand death with no connection to her. This would have spread itself across an entire terrain whether she had been there or not.
A chiller chill struck her, one that shivered ice through her marrow. Grand death on a planetary stage, but intimately connected to her. The sky weapons did not fire arbitrarily, least of all at planetary defence aerospace fighters. Unless the angels were mad and ROTECH insane, another had gained control of the orbital partacs. Other being a soft-voiced, grey-haired man in a light-swallowing suit with a cane in one hand and the soul of St. Catherine in a stasis jar in the other.
She had been sole human witness of the opening shots of the war between Harx and the angels. He was testing his powers, and they were sure and strong.
In confirmation, after the space battle came the duststorm.
A curvet of wind had tugged Sweetness’s cheek as she trudged the upline, burdened with her own thoughts and responsibilities. It had to tweak twice to get her attention. She looked up and saw, like the mother of slow trains a’coming, the boiling wall of ochre dust rolling toward her down the line, shot through with steel lightnings.