Over halibut balls in the train-station cafe the next morning, Bushell plowed through the Prince Rupert Register. The banner headline told of the gunfight at Buckley Bay and the death of Felix Crooke. He was, an enterprising reporter had discovered, the first RAM killed by gunfire in fourteen years. Samuel Stanley had a copy of the Register, too. When he finished his eggs and bacon, he slammed the paper down and growled, “Why don’t they just wire the Sons of Liberty what we were up to there?
Every bloody rag in the whole bloody NAU will have printed this by tomorrow.”
Tomorrow, the two RAMs would, if everything went well, be getting into Regina and making their airship connection for Astoria. Worrying about that was enough for Bushell at the moment; he stayed philosophical about the newspaper. “Could be worse,” he said. “The story doesn’t mention our names.”
“Huzzah,” Stanley said sourly. “The whole bloody Empire already knows we were headed up this way. The trouble with the Sons is, they’re smart enough to remember that and make the connection.”
“Damn all we can do about it,” Bushell said. A tinny speaker announced the imminent departure of the train bound for Prince George and Wellesley. He gulped the last of his Irish Breakfast, slammed the cup down on the table, and hurried to the platform. Still grumbling, Samuel Stanley followed. The nine-hour trip back to Prince George was like watching a film run in reverse. Bushell felt bored and useless. On most journeys, he used his time wisely, bringing along plenty of work to occupy him while he was traveling to ready him for whatever he had to do once he arrived at his destination. All that mattered now was arriving, for he couldn’t do anything useful till he got to Doshoweh. The thought of climbing into the open cockpit of a military aeroplane and whizzing across the continent at a couple of hundred miles an hour seemed less foolishly extravagant than it had when he’d laughed at it in the dining room of the Upper California Limited.
He fell asleep in his seat, lulled by the rhythm of the rails and by a long succession of short nights. The squeal of the train’s brakes as it pulled into Prince George woke him. In the aisle seat beside him, Samuel Stanley seemed ready to snore all the way down to Wellesley.
Regretfully, Bushell shook him. “We change trains here, Sam.”
Stanley’s eyes flew open. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said indignantly. He looked out the window and saw they were at the station. A sheepish grin spread over his face. “Oh. Maybe I was.”
They went back to the baggage car and made sure a porter transferred their cases to the platform where the train that would take them to Regina waited. Bushell slipped the fellow a ten-shilling note and, after a moment’s hesitation, half a crown to go with it. Far from home, he was willing to pay to ensure things running smoothly.
The Northern Rockies Special pulled out of Prince George at twenty past three, ten minutes late. Although the delay would be inconsequential when set against the nearly daylong journey to Regina, Bushell fretted nonetheless. He knew he was gambling, and knew that if he lost his gamble he would have done better not to make it.
“I wish Edmonton had airships going out of it oftener than every third day,” he muttered to Samuel Stanley.
“So do I, Chief - uh, Tom - but I can’t do anything about it,” Stanley answered. “Might as well wish the Rockies were flat, so we’d make better time through ‘em. We do the best we can with the hand we’ve been dealt, that’s all.”
They were approaching the Rockies when they went to the dining car for supper. Bushell ate steak and kidney pie, Stanley Helvetian steak with mushrooms. When they’d finished, they returned to the sleeping compartment they were sharing and watched for a while as the mountains grew all around them. Yellowknife Pass, through which they’d traverse the Rockies, topped out at less than four thousand feet, but great steep piles of granite and basalt, cloaked with conifers on their lower slopes and snow and ice above, reached high into the sky to north and south.
“Pretty country,” Stanley remarked after a while.
Bushell grunted. He had his nose in a book by then: a scientific romance he’d taken from the Sons’ shelter in Buckley Bay. It was called The United Colonies Triumphant and seemed typical of the breed: it showed an independent North America coming to the rescue of England in a great European war against, not the Holy Alliance or Russia, but, of all improbable things, a unified Germany.
“Damned foolishness,” Bushell growled, tempted to fling the poorly written tome across the compartment. “As if the British Empire wouldn’t be the mightiest in the world even without North America.”
“Why do you wade through the tripe if it annoys you so?” Stanley asked.
“I keep trying to understand how the Sons think - ‘know your enemy,’“ Bushell said. “But this is just foolishness. The book is set now, more or less, and in this mythical world North America is an even greater center of manufactures than it is in truth, but it still keeps Negroes and Indians in bondage as farmhands. The author is too ignorant to see how machines would take the place of slaves.”
Stanley’s mouth tightened. “Even so, that does tell you something about the way those people think.”
“Something, yes, but nothing pleasant - and nothing I didn’t already know.” Bushell paused to light a cigar, then picked up The United Colonies Triumphant once more. “ ‘Scientific romance’ my arse - no science and no romance to it that I can see: just someone who doesn’t write very well proving it at great length. A world that never could be, not in a thousand years.” He let out a noise half snort, half guffaw. The book was too preposterous for words.
A large sign by the railroad track announced that they were passing out of the province of Vancouver and into the province of Albertus. A few hundred yards farther on, a series of several smaller signs extolled the virtues of a patent shaving soap. Bushell found the foolish jingling verses on them badly out of place when set against the brooding majesty of the mountains.
Shadows pooled and lengthened. After a while, the train was running in deep twilight while the mountainsides above still blazed with light. Some of the mountains’ flanks were covered not merely with snow but with ice; near the little town of Jasper, one glacier came down almost near enough to touch out the window, or so it seemed.
“Beautiful scenery,” Bushell said; The United Colonies Triumphant wasn’t nearly interesting enough to keep him reading at a steady clip. “But it’s a cold beauty, and it makes me cold looking at it.”
“If that Swedish fashion for sliding through snow with boards on your feet ever caught on in the NAU, this is where they’d come to do it,” Samuel Stanley said. “Skiing, that’s what they call it. I’d almost forgotten.”
“I never knew,” Bushell said. “Where did you learn that?”
“The army, a couple of years before I was attached to your platoon,” Stanley answered. “If you ever have to fight on snow, you can go a lot faster on those skis than you can on snowshoes. The Russians have skiers in Alaska: a couple of regiments of them, they said at my training center.”
Bushell had a disquieting vision of regiments of Russians with boards on their feet and Nagants on their backs gliding across the frozen northern reaches of the NAU one winter, not stopping till they came to the icebound shores of Hudson Bay. He knew the vision was absurd; no matter how mobile they were, a couple of regiments of troops wouldn’t go far, and a lot of land lay between the Alaskan frontier and Hudson Bay. But he’d had Russians on the brain lately.
To keep from thinking about Russians and ski troops, he went back to the scientific romance again. They worried about Germans there. That was laughable by anyone’s standards. Germans were good for music, beer, heavy food, heavier philosophies, and squabbling among themselves. Bavarians were jolly, Austrians haughty, and Prussians inclined to be dour (who could blame them for that, when they were stuck next to Russia?), but they weren’t forces to reckon with, nor was any other German kingdom, principality, duchy, archibishopric, or free city. The idea of all of them behind a single malign ruler was . . .”Absurd,” Bushell said with another snort, and plowed on.