As I said one, the rails below us brightened and the engine roared past in a sudden rush of wind and metal and noise. Anne dropped exactly as I said zero, twisting as she fell. She landed catlike on hands and feet in the centre of the first freight carriage, and I vaulted the railing and dropped after her.
There was one sickening moment of free-fall where everything hung suspended, then I crashed into the metal of the carriage with a painful thump, bruising my feet and shoulder as I rolled. I came up just in time to see the roof of the next tunnel heading towards me and I went flat.
The train went into the tunnel and the world became pitch-darkness and deafening noise. The tops of the freight cars were flat metal and there was nothing to hold on to, so all I could do was lie flat and hope. I could feel the steady vibration of the wheels through the car, the carriage going cha-chunk cha-chunk . . . cha-chunk cha-chunk again and again. The time in the tunnel felt like an age, but looking back I don’t think it could have been more than a minute. Finally with a whoosh we were out in the open and I rose to a crouch, looking around.
The train had come out onto a stretch of open track. To one side houses and gardens slid by, while behind us the tunnel mouth receded away, one freight car after another emerging into the fuzzy darkness of the summer night. Cables and girders slid by above as the train rolled along at a steady twenty-five miles per hour. The freight carriages were rectangular and dark-blue; the metal gave good footing but there was no cover unless you wanted to get down into the gap between the cars. Anne was at the front of the train on the first carriage, but behind us the cars were still appearing from the tunnel and I looked into the future, searching for movement. Nothing . . . nothing . . . crap.
I heard a clang from behind me and didn’t look around. Anne stepped up next to me, peering back through the darkness. “Anything?”
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”
Anne sighed. “Bad.”
“We’ve got three of them still on our tail,” I said, pointing down to where the end of the train faded into darkness. “Will, the Chinese kid, and Captain America.”
“What’s the good news?”
“The good news is I think we’ve lost the others.”
Anne shook her head. “You’ve got a funny definition of good news.” She touched my shoulder and I felt a soft warmth spread through me as the ache from the bruises I’d picked up went away.
“Thanks.” I walked to the middle of the carriage, taking the gold discs out of my pocket.
“I guess this is a problem with trains as an escape plan,” Anne said, looking around. The rush of wind was steady, but not loud enough to drown out voices. “Once you’re on it’s kind of hard to get off.”
“Does tend to be.” I placed the discs at either edge of the car, checking to make sure the vibration of the train wouldn’t bump them off. The timing on this was going to be tight. Will’s group was advancing up the train; we had no more than a minute.
“Is that another forcewall?”
“Yep.” I squinted down the line of where the forcewall would activate, then looked around. We were on the train’s fourth carriage: behind us were the third, second, and first carriages, followed by the engine. “Okay. When I tell you to go, I need you to get back off this carriage to the next one up.”
Anne raised her eyebrows. “While you stay behind?”
“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be right after you,” I said. “I don’t want to get any closer to this than I have to.” Movement caught my eye from down the train, and I stepped back. “Here they come.”
Will and the other two adepts came out of the darkness like flitting shadows, leaping from car to car as the train rumbled through the night. As they saw us waiting for them they slowed, Will letting the other two catch up, then they made the jump onto the fourth carriage where we were standing and stopped about twenty feet away. Will stood in the centre with Captain America backing him up; both wore what looked like light ballistic vests and Will was holding a shortsword in his left hand that I was pretty sure was the same one that he’d stabbed me with back in the casino. The Chinese kid hung a little farther back. Unlike the other two he didn’t have any visible weapons or armour. The five of us stared at each other in the darkness.
“So,” I said at last. “I’m guessing I should take this as a ‘no’ on the truce offer?”
Will’s eyes stayed locked on me. “End of the line.”
“You wish,” I said. Will didn’t look away, and neither did I. The seconds stretched out, violence hanging in the air.
“You know,” Will said suddenly, “before we do this, there’s something I want to know.” He stood facing me in the darkness, easily keeping his balance on the rocking train. “Why us? You could have picked any adept in England. What was so important about my family that you had to destroy our lives?”
I looked at Will for a moment, then sighed. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.” Will’s voice was flat.
“Richard told us to get Catherine. He never told us why.”
Will studied me. “Just following orders, huh?”
“I’d like to say it was something better than that,” I said. “But yeah. That pretty much sums it up. I tried to undo it, but by then it was too late.”
“Wow. Guess you’ve had a tough life.”
I looked at Will silently.
“Good thing it’s over.” In a blur of motion Will levelled a handgun at my chest and pulled the trigger.
Before the gun fired I said the command word. To normal eyes nothing happened. In my sight the two gold discs flared to life and a forcewall flicked into existence on top of the train, forming a vertical barrier separating the adepts from me and Anne. An instant later I saw the flash of the gun.
Forcewalls work by transferring momentum; any body impacting the wall from either side has its momentum transferred into the object the forcewall is anchored to. Force mages can anchor their walls as they choose but for one-shot items like this, which work on command and only for a limited time, the anchor target has to be built in. In the case of my gold-disc walls, the anchor is set to whatever the discs rest on—in this case, the freight car.
The bullet from Will’s gun left the barrel at a little over twelve hundred feet per second and travelled the distance to the forcewall in much, much less time than it took me to flinch. As it struck the forcewall its momentum was transferred through the gold discs down into the body of the freight car. The bullet was fast, but momentum is a function of both velocity and mass, and the bullet had a mass of only about a quarter of an ounce. The freight car had a mass of somewhere north of sixty thousand pounds, not counting its cargo. The freight car didn’t even quiver.
Will emptied his gun at me, the steady bang bang bang muffled through the forcewall. The rest of the shots accomplished about as much as the first. At last the gun clicked empty and he lowered it, staring.
The squashed bullets were lying at the foot of the wall on Will’s side, vibrating slightly with the movement of the train. It was hard to tell in the darkness but it looked like Will had been using hollow-point ammunition, designed to expand upon hitting its target. It’s not much good at getting through armour or shields but leaves very nasty wounds in a living body, making it the kind of bullet you use for shooting someone whom you don’t expect to be well protected and whom you really aren’t interested in taking alive. “Are you done?” I asked.
Will pulled out a clip and began reloading. As he did he spoke sideways to Captain America. “Got anything that’ll blow through that?”