Marque of Caine

by Charles E Gannon

  “Security?” The Spaniard transitioned from scowling skepticism to intense interest. “What do you mean?”

  Riordan spread his hands. “Does your movement have trouble with infiltrators and informants?”

  Dark looks were traded around the table.

  Caine nodded. “So you need better counterintelligence. And then…”

  “And then we are ready to strike!” The Spanish smuggler’s eyes gleamed.

  “No,” Riordan corrected. “Then you need to recruit people who are willing to join, or already are part of, your enemy’s infrastructure. Their job is not to attack Coal, but to carry its information out to you.”

  Prins glanced meaningfully at Voldermaras. “We don’t get many people like that.”

  The fatherly Lithuanian stroked his beard. “Recruiting such persons would require large organizational changes.”

  “And large amounts of money,” Prins sighed.

  Caine shrugged. “I might be able to help with that, too.”

  One of the Spaniard’s saturnine brows arched high. “You can make money for us? How?”

  Riordan smiled. “The stock market.”

  Prins glanced at Caine. “Friend, that is not as easy as you might believe.”

  “It is if you know that a disaster of your own making is about to hit a company. For instance, what if you had a purchasing agent who knew—knew—that a certain coal shipping line would soon lose several of its ships in a dock fire?”

  “Colliers?” exclaimed Pip. “Caine, the 3C’s Blackhands guard those cargos like a mother cat guards her kittens.”

  “I’m talking about when the ships are empty, Pip.”

  “Well, that would be easy enough, I suppose. But how do we make a profit from that?”

  Caine paused. Trading mechanisms that were commonplace on his Earth might not yet have been formalized in this one. “Are you familiar with the term, ‘short sell?’” The blank expressions around the table had been more eloquent than any answer.

  The memory was jogged aside momentarily as the baggage car swayed, then bumped sharply. It was on the main track now, soon to head over the Old Saybrook bridge.

  Superimposed upon Caine’s quick mental image of that extremely conventional span were dozens more: bridges in Paris, Prague, Stockholm, Florence. In Indian cities with names he still couldn’t pronounce. In jungle-hidden villages with names he had never learned. Wherever he went, there were always bridges. Over the past three years, how many had he crossed? How many trains had he ridden? How many roads had he traveled? He couldn’t recall and hadn’t tried to keep count while circling the globe as an unofficial liaison among resistance groups.

  After his short-sell strategy tripled the operating budget of the movement in Amsterdam, “Mr. Cei” had been summoned to Prague. There, various resistance leaders had grilled him on both his bona fides and his future plans. Many had balked at his refusal to share the details of his background, but his successes and practical outline for greater coordination among the globe’s scattered insurgencies impressed them.

  However, it was his unprecedented knowledge that ultimately won them over. In a world where petroleum and its byproducts were unknown, much of the transformative chemical research of the second half of the nineteenth century had never taken place. Against that stifled scientific silence, Riordan’s calm explanations of how to efficiently and economically produce large quantities of nitric acid, white phosphorous, and hydrogen were a revelatory thunderclap. Laboratory confirmations of his claims, and their ready weaponization, led the resistance leaders to ultimately trust the calm, mysterious stranger who they codenamed “The Professor.”

  The European resistance grew in size and confidence. Its leadership reached out to other regions, transformed localized dissent into a global insurgency. In every country, new groups arose, eager to join the fight but unsure how best to do so. Visiting and developing cadres for those fledgling resistance cells soon became the most crucial job in the movement. A job to which the Professor was tirelessly dedicated.

  Riordan had also laid the technological and logistical foundations for an operation that ultimately marked a turning point in the conflict: a conventional battle against Coal’s armies. Fought at the end of the summer just past, the engagement had stunned the world. The reports were everything that Caine had hoped for. “Mere peasant farmers” armed with “impossibly sophisticated weapons” had routed both Imperial Chinese regiments and stiffening troops sent along by the European cantonments in Tianjin.

  And so Riordan’s challenge to Coal had finally drawn both Lord Weiner’s assets and attention to China. Weiner/Kutkh had been forced to reconsider. After years waiting for Caine to attack directly, all the signs now pointed to a different, maddeningly indirect, strategy. Riordan meant to destroy the world order, and with it, Kutkh’s wealth, power, and invulnerability.

  Accordingly, Weiner had sent spies and troop ships across the Pacific to eliminate the human who had orchestrated this global revolt.

  And whose actions had kindled a deadly resolve in the grim-eyed men standing in the swaying baggage car, waiting to intercept Weiner’s personal train.

  Riordan nodded at them. “Stand to your positions.” He flipped a switch linking a small telegraph handset to a bank of wet cells. “The command circuit is live. Wait for your signals. Listen for Pip’s whistle in case of a line failure. And good luck.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  JULY 2124

  LELTLOSU-SHAI (VIRTUA), BD+75 403A

  As most of the men tramped back to the third, fourth, and fifth cars, Riordan leaned out again, waited to catch Pip’s eye. The Englishman was double-checking the springs of a self-unfolding wood lattice that left little room for the eight men with him in the lead car. “Too late to worry about it now,” Caine shouted above the wind and the wheels. “Either it works or it doesn’t.”

  “That’s right enough!” Robinson howled back with a grin. “Three times over!” Similar devices were coiled in readiness in cars three and five.

  “Is the target in sight?”

  Pip turned to his observer at the car’s lead door, who had a clear view past their dilapidated switcher engine. There was no coal or wood car. “What’re yeh seein’, Jock?”

  Pip strained to hear the reply, relayed it loudly. “Weiner’s train is just on the bridge.”

  “And the final ‘go’ sign?”

  “The bedsheet is still flapping from the trusses on the eastern span. The strikers are primed and the circuit is ready.”

  Riordan nodded, grateful but not really relieved. He’d yet to see a plan where something didn’t go wrong.

  Their train rattled as it ran out on to the rails of the bridge. It was a pratt truss with three spans: the west one that they had just entered from the Saybrook side; the center that towered over the deepest part of the river; and the eastern span, which Weiner’s mighty locomotive was traversing as it left the Groton side.

  The team in Riordan’s car finished removing the weather tarp from the third-generation Puckle gun they had secured to the floorboards in front of the loading door. The chief of the crew, a French journalist by the name of Pompogne, caught Riordan’s eye. He’d had been a war correspondent until running afoul of the 3C-controlled Ministry of Commerce and Credit. That, and his reputation for unflappability in the face of certain death, had served him well in the resistance. But at this moment, the Frenchman’s renowned sangfroid seemed less than absolute. “Monsieur Cei, a word, if I may.”

  “A quick word, if any, Pompogne.”

  “Oui. May we truly hope to escape, or is that a fable to stiffen the courage of the men?”

  Riordan took an extra second to fix the Parisian’s gaze. “Pompogne, I do not lie to my troops. Nor do I believe in suicide missions. The ropes lashed to the middle pier lead down to the water. Two of the boats that will come out from Groton are ours. If you’ve put on your armband, they’ll pick you up and make for Fishers Island. A ship is waiting there.
Now, just follow the plan and remember your training.”

  Pompogne nodded and returned to the crew of the Puckle gun.

  Their locomotive’s whistle shrilled twice. A standard greeting between trains, but also a signal for Caine’s men: the enemy engine was now within a hundred yards.

  Cradling the command relay, Riordan moved to the steel-lined side of the baggage car and uncovered the crude periscope affixed there. Its wide-angle lens was concealed under the rain cap of a false ventilation pipe and provided a one-hundred-twenty-degree field of vision. To the far right, he could see Weiner’s train approaching.

  As expected, the squat, four-wheeled iron security car was at the front, but if it was carrying its Puckle gun—rumored to be mounted on internal rails for quick repositioning—there was no sign of it. Just behind, the armored locomotive belched black smoke: coal. Only the best for Weiner, whose arrogance had evidently rubbed off on his crew—his chief engineer did not deign to return the hail of their approaching rust-bucket engine. Which was why Riordan had told his men to purloin the ugliest, oldest pug of a locomotive that they could. If their little train seemed unworthy of a second look, all the better.

  At the midpoint of the bridge, Weiner’s juggernaut rushed past. Caine nudged the periscope to view the track ahead of it, glanced down at his watch and looked back up…

  …just in time to hear a thunderclap from the western end of the bridge and see trusswork and rails flying high into the gray sky. Cheering started along the cars of Riordan’s train—damn, didn’t see that coming—but there was no way to silence his men now.

  However, their voices were abruptly buried beneath the iron-on-iron screeching of locked wheels as Weiner’s locomotive slammed on its brakes. The big engine and heavy cars bucked against the sudden deceleration, shimmied, but stayed on their tracks. Again, as expected. Weiner’s staff were the best at what they did.

  His private guards had a particularly fearsome reputation, which was why some of Caine’s associates had preferred a different plan: to rig the whole bridge with explosives and detonate them from a safe distance. But Riordan surprised them by insisting that Weiner had to be killed in personal combat, preferably by Caine himself. It was a more profound statement, he calmly explained to his speechless colleagues. Besides, if they did not see Weiner die, then there was no way to be sure that he had.

  Four seconds after the first blast, a matching detonation shattered a good part of the eastern span, lumber and twisted iron spinning upward and outward over the Connecticut River. Riordan’s own locomotive braked hard, wheels squealing. But it was a lighter train with plenty of safe track ahead; their stubby switcher engine came to a halt with a hundred yards to spare. After ten seconds, Riordan’s engineer, a singularly taciturn fellow from Turin, began reversing carefully away from the ruined rails in front of them.

  Riordan swung the periscope back toward Weiner’s motionless train. A handful of men in overalls had descended from its immense locomotive. A few others in gray dusters were swinging down from the steel-shuttered corridor coaches, rifles in hand. No Lorenzoni actions, here—their weapons were late model break-breech percussion carbines. Too easily fouled or damaged to be trusted on a conventional battlefield, but for short, intense firefights, the gun’s preformed paper loads delivered a dramatic increase in rate of fire. One or two of Weiner’s guards noticed the small baggage train now reversing toward their end of the bridge, waved to get the attention of their engineers.

  Riordan gauged the distance. Approximately one hundred yards between the rear cars of the two trains, so about forty seconds.

  Another engineer hopped down from the cab of Weiner’s locomotive, started running toward Riordan’s switcher engine, waving a red flag. A few moments later, through the firing ports of the battery car at the end of Weiner’s train, he saw the partial shadows of the gun crews moving energetically. Not good. But again, not unexpected.

  Riordan leaned away from the periscope and back into the doorway. “Pip!”

  The Englishman’s head popped around the far side of the folded grid of four-by-fours. “They on to us?”

  “They will be soon. We need more steam, then a hard brake.” Robinson nodded and went forward to pass the word to the engineer.

  Caine snugged his eye back against the periscope’s eyepiece as the first flag-waver was joined by another. More ominously, the muzzle of the last cannon in the battery car was swinging in their direction.

  The floor jerked under Riordan’s feet. He reflexively grabbed the armor plating in front of him. The engineer had yanked open the throttle to steam backward, beyond where the enemy gun could traverse. Caine swayed back toward the periscope. Twenty yards between the trains. They just might make it if—

  The cannon roared. A deafening explosion answered and suddenly, all sound was an indistinct rumble muffled under a loud, painful ringing. Riordan staggered away from the periscope, glanced down the length of Pip’s car. Through the door at the far end, he saw a vertical jet of steam gushing from a wide tear in the top of their engine’s boiler: a wound inflicted by the cannonball, which, after hitting high, had exploded an instant later, blowing the smokestack off. Even as the engineer from Turin slammed on the brakes, the hiss of venting steam soared into a metal-shuddering howl. Riordan ducked back.

  The boiler blew apart. The world went sideways. Fragments shrieked through the first car, ripping away the restraints that held the self-unfolding gridwork compressed. The springs uncoiled with a screech, flipping open the three-piece boarding ramp. It smashed against the car’s left side, which, modified to hinge open along its bottom, was flung outward by the blow. As the train began to slow, the wooden gridwork extended upward and outward, began to drop…and kissed the roof of one of Weiner’s armored coaches.

  Wood shattered as the initial impact bounced and twisted the ramp’s gridwork. Beams shivered apart. Bolts tore out as it dragged along the coach’s roof…and then dipped into the gap between cars. Snagged, the end of the ramp flew apart in a shower of ruined planks and braces. Its amputated stump fell, twisting as it scraped and splintered along the siding until Riordan’s train finally rolled to a stop, its baggage cars well beyond the rearward traverse of the enemy cannon.

  “Pip?” Riordan shouted.

  “Here,” came Robinson’s response from the jumbled ruin of the first baggage car. “I’m all right. So’s half of my team. We’ll join the ground attack.”

  Which meant that Riordan’s total boarding force had been reduced by a third. So, an even harder fight and even more casualties. He leaned back toward the periscope. So, while they’re still surprised… Caine pumped the command circuit’s clacker, yelled “Go!” and, just to be sure, got his whistle in his teeth and blew a long blast.

  The sides of the third and fifth cars fell outward. Springs were released, freeing the last two boarding ramps. They unfolded at an angle, like self-extending fire ladders until their teams yanked out the elevation chocks. The ramps crashed down on the roofs of the armored coaches opposite them. A moment later, the loading door of fourth baggage car slid open, just before the one in Riordan’s own, second car did the same.

  Caine clacked the command circuit twice, blew his whistle in unison with it.

  The first assault wave—light, nimble men—swarmed across the ramps toward the roofs of the enemy train less than four yards away. Weiner’s marksmen opened the shutters of their armored coaches, aimed upward at the boarders, and promptly came under fire from the shielded Puckle guns shooting from the side doors of baggage cars two and four.

  The chaos was total. Falling bodies. Flashing weapons. Coaches and baggage cars rapidly riddled with holes. But the greatest madness was the tidal wave of sound: hammering weapons, shrieked orders, sharp detonations. All roiling in the hellishly narrow gap between the two broadside trains. Again deafened, Caine struggled to think, to stay alert for signs that the boarders had breached Weiner’s well-armored cars.

  Riflemen in the lead security car
, partially blocked by the locomotive and its coal tender behind, shot the second and third boarders from baggage car five off its ramp. One fell into the gap between the trains and exploded the instant he hit the ground. Streamers of clothes and flesh spattered against the sides of both trains, just as the first boarder reached the roof of the lead coach. He gently lobbed an entire bandolier of vials over the short coal tender and into the cab of the locomotive. The back-to-back explosions—first the bombs, then the engine’s boiler—almost jolted him off the roof.

  The savage firefight raging between the middle cars of the two trains was dominated by the Puckle guns, which pounded through the side armor and sheet steel blinds of the sleeper coaches. More boarders swarmed over the grids; more were shot down. Another, in the heat of combat, forgot the detonators’ sensitivity. As he tore a vial from his bandolier, it triggered. He vanished without a trace.

  The remaining boarders hurled vials in front of them to blow holes in the cars’ unarmored roofs, lobbed others down into the interiors. One coach burst outward, spraying steel debris into the facing baggage cars, slicing through several of Caine’s waiting wave of ground attackers.

  But the armored coaches had been multiply breached. Riordan jammed on his open-faced helmet and clicked the command circuit three times—the signal to unleash the final, suppressive volley.

  The Puckle guns began pounding out rounds feverishly. Although less carefully aimed, they blew additional holes in the already weakened sides of the passenger couches bracketing Weiner’s observation car. The gun battles raging between the roof-perching boarders and the defenders still huddling inside the coaches intensified. A few more of Riordan’s men toppled as they leaned forward to unload their revolvers and wheelguns down into the shattered metal boxes.

  Riordan turned away from periscope, nodded to the waiting troops in his car, then clacked and blew his whistle four times: close assault. He drew his saber, his lowest-hanging revolver, and stepped to the side door where Pompogne and the other Puckle gunners were pulling the weapon aside. “Follow us,” he ordered, then jumped down to the siding.