Despite having programmed every line of code, Frank couldn’t figure out how to get clear of the world-wide-web he had created. Even with all the train’s terminals shut down, the network itself was keeping track of their position. Short of denying the transmitting hardware enough energy to function, which would render the entire train inoperable, there didn’t seem to be any way to disconnect completely. Frank didn’t want to admit it, but he felt confident that the Matron had installed some sort of malware on their computers. He was mere seconds away from confessing the problem to his master when he thought of a creative solution.
By closing all the ports he had installed in the train’s invisible shield for ventilation and communication, the Silver Bullet dropped off the map. Even with their high tech air filters, they would only be able to last a few hours with the vents closed, but the train would be navigable and invisible from above. Frank told his master everything, and Mister Morton was not happy with any of his options. The idea of going to hide inside his clock tower was comforting, but he had lost track of the Marshal during their time in the desert, so it would likely lead to a quick death.
Hunting alongside hundreds of millions of people sounded fun, but the idea of hiring so many poachers to hunt one monster was absurd, so Morton assumed the Matron had a more sinister plan for her army. Even though taking control of the Matron’s troops no longer seemed feasible, Morton decided to stick around at least until the end of the preparatory hour to see what happened. Try as he might, Frank could not raise radio communications with anyone outside their Key, and they had to assume that the Matron was listening to everything. As not to tip their hand by sharing too much over the radio, they flagged down as many other poaching parties as they could and clued them in to the space witch’s game.
Standing on the deck of the train in flatcar mode, shooting up flares, and blaring music over the PA system, the Silver Bullet added a few teams to their convoy, but most of those they approached weren’t interested. Given how much poachers disliked taking orders, Morton was surprised they weren’t more receptive to his cause, but they were thoroughly committed to earning their paychecks. Even those who did join didn’t seem happy about their situation, and Morton knew they were in dire straits. He thought more about running, going down to the southern coast to hide amongst the rocky crags of its shore, but remembering the sound of the crashing waves inspired him to stand strong and try to take down the Matron.
When Wolfchan’s voice came back on, there was a new electricity in her smile. “Great job friends, you picked that up quickly. Communication is Key!” She laughed at her pun while the massive army of poachers stayed silent. “Remember, following orders is the best way to stay alive!” She seemed absolutely giddy but her tone suddenly turned dark. “Now I hate to do this... but I’m going to take another second to talk about money. You’ve taken a lot of it from me, and I expect a lot from you in return. I’m not going to sugar-coat it—a lot of you are going to die. Don’t get me wrong, you’re all very capable people and you’re very good at your jobs. I know. But believe you me, you’ve never fought a creature like this before.”
Angry booing and masses of profanity came over the radio and again Wolfchan muted them. “Hush!” she shouted scoldingly, but then in an even sweeter tone, she said, “Your pride is appreciated. And I know you. I know you won’t quit. I know that you are people who keep their word. You’re not out here to capture this beast. You’re out here to kill it. And if you manage to survive longer than it does,” her voice was still silky sweet but it became lower and more seductive, “you might find yourself even richer than our dear Mister Morton...”
The legend to the map in every poacher’s vehicle was temporarily replaced with a chart full of large numbers as Wolfchan said excitedly, “You still have your union bonuses and any contracts you signed with Kravinov or I are still valid, of course, but to keep you motivated and thereby ensure our success, on top of everything else you’ve been promised thus far, I’m going to pay you each another full-share based on your union rates!”
Unmuting the poachers, the radio went wild with excited roars of approval. As a vicious feedback loop began, Frank tried to turn down the volume but could not.
Slowly re-muting them, Wolfchan said with a laugh, “Whoa, now! Simmer down! It’s just money! But on top of that, as you can now see on your screen, there is an entirely new list of incentives with tiered rewards based on your Key accomplishments! Okay folks, that’s it. Just to remind you, you don’t get paid if you die! So try your best, follow your Key, and good luck!”
Wolfchan’s face was replaced by the map and legend. Morton stormed over to his liquor cart to pour himself a drink. Before he could start screaming at Frank about what a disaster that had all been, Wolfchan’s image returned to the train’s screens. With intense enthusiasm, she said, “Mister Morton! I don’t think we’ve formally met! I don’t even remember inviting you, and I know you never signed a contract with me, but I heard your little speech and I wanted to let you know that you are now officially my number one most honored guest!”
“Ohhh, we’ve met,” Morton chuckled, “a number of times.” Finding himself surprisingly calm, he finished his drink in one gulp, walked slowly over to his desk, and slammed the empty glass down, shattering it.
A wicked smile crossed Wolfchan’s youthful face, “Oh, baby doll,” Wolfchan replied, sopping with concern. “Is your hand okay? It’s hard to tell from here, but I think I see blood!”
Feeling the calm slipping away from him, Morton tried not to scowl. “I really enjoyed your performance just now. You sure know how to put on a good show... But you’re seriously going to pretend you don’t know me? I think that was the only part that wasn’t convincing.”
Still with her bubbly sweet southern drawl, Wolfchan said, “Well, hunny, everyone ‘round these parts has done a little business with the great Mister Morton! I’m sure we’ve traded dollars a few times in the past, but I don’t believe we’ve actually met.”
Plastering a cardboard smile onto his face, Morton replied through clenched teeth, “Guess I must have mistaken you for someone else...”
With a cackle that sounded more like it came from the Matron than her Wolfchan persona she said, “Awwww! Did I hurt your feelings? Well, I have something that might make you feel better. Enjoy!” With that she disappeared. The map and legend returned to the screen, and their Key turned into a bright blue circle.
Wolfchan’s voice came over the radio to all the poachers, “Alright friends, the game is afoot! Or apaw, or whatever a werwolf has. Good luck!” An info ticker started scrolling across the bottom of the legend and red bullseye appeared on a spot near the planet’s southern coast. A new window filled with video static popped up in the top right corner of their screen. Wolfchan came on again, this time pretending to sound disappointed. “Sorry about that gang! Damned thing shot out of the gate too fast!”
Then, through the video window, they saw a beautiful shot of the rocky coastline with white-capped waves splashing up over it. Morton thought of his dream but again the screen turned to static. Three more similar views appeared, each one of them turning to static just a second after it appeared. Laughing hysterically now, Wolfchan said, “Couldn’t see a thing! Let’s go to some stills until we get some solid video footage. Whaddaya say?”
A slideshow of blurry images began, the first of which being a complete mess with nothing discernible in it. The second had a clear landscape marred by a dark grey streak across its center. The third was similar, but the grey mass in the middle was larger and there were vague limbs attached to it. The fourth was unmistakably the inside of a mouth—one enormous fang taking up a majority of the frame and a long row of sharp white teeth behind it. Then there was a very dark shot where what appeared to be a paw took up half of the frame and a clear blue sky on the other. The next one had a nearly vertical horizon, which Frank took to mean the creature had struck the vehicle and sent it flying.
Finally, there
was a distant but clear shot of the massive creature, which millions of poachers squinted to see more clearly. It was hard to tell, but Frank gauged it at roughly two tons and three meters tall. Massive trapezii ran from the bottom of its pointy ears down to the outer edge of its shoulders, making it look like some kind of mastiff. But from the wild look in its shining silver eyes, its sparse blue-grey mane, and long pointed cuspids, it was clearly a giant wolf. Next was a fantastic action shot, wherein one of the creature’s fangs had impaled the hood of a vehicle. Its jaw was probably as wide as the carrier itself, and from the blurry background, it seemed to be going airborne. Staring into its ferocious eye, Morton recognized a burning anger with which he empathized greatly.
As the series of images progressed, even the most seasoned poachers started to believe what Wolfchan had said about the werwolf not being like other monsters. Morton could not get the way she had said the word out of his head. Werwolf. There wasn’t enough inflection in her voice for him to put his finger on exactly what it was. He had never believed that they were out there chasing a mythical Old Earth werewolf, and there wasn’t enough time to consider as much consciously, but deep in the recesses of his mind he started to suspect that the creature was Werbian. All around the world, millions of eyes were glued to their maps, where a puddle of red had started to collect along the southern coast. “Frank,” Morton asked, knowing all too well what the answer would be, “what does red mean?”
Before his henchman could reply, Wolfchan’s bubbly voice returned. “Okay folks, I have a few minutes worth of video here. It starts off a little choppy...” A rapid video montage began where vehicle after vehicle would be struck by the monster before turning to static. Landscapes would suddenly flip or turn sideways, carriers exploded into indistinguishable debris, and vague glimpses of the creature moving too fast to see were all accompanied by screams of terror and the sounds of violent collisions. A slow-motion but still blurry shot of the beast running towards the camera let everyone see how unbelievably fast the thing really was, before that too turned to static.
“Ohhhh yeah...” Wolfchan hollered with disturbing satisfaction. “That, my friends, is the werwolf...” Chills went through the entire poacher army as a string of videos continued to play on their monitors. The red tide was seeping up from the bottom of the globe at an astonishing rate as more and more vehicles were destroyed. At first it pooled atop the southern shoreline, but there was a thick concentration in the southern Americas where Wolfchan’s Key had told thousands of poachers to assemble and the creature tore through them like chain lightning. Ripping its way north, it looked like blood soaking out from a knife wound as a steady stream of nodes turned red.
“That’s impossible,” Frank muttered. His military pre-education told him it had to be orbital artillery, or chemical weapons, or a swarm of insects that had been dormant underground. “It can’t be that fast...”
Noticing that there weren’t any blue dots between the red, Morton said softly, “It hasn’t missed a single target.”
Frank ran to his terminal to send out warnings but still couldn’t reach anyone outside of their Key. He felt incredibly guilty for having designed and distributed the software that had linked them all to the network, and wrote instructions that he hoped would help others disable their comm systems and encourage them to abandon their vehicles.
Morton walked slowly back to his desk and sat down, not bothering to stop at the liquor cart. Red continued to soak its way up the map, and the gruesome videos continued to play. “It’s pointless, Frank,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. A few minutes, later their Key changed, instructing them to ride north by northwest to meet up with over a hundred thousand poachers in a large, eye-shaped valley a little more than a day’s ride from their location. A fully-formed plan appeared inside Morton’s head.
After everything had been explained to Frank, the henchman went outside to tell everyone riding with them what they needed to know. Still in flatcar mode as they rode to the rendezvous, they tried to recruit more poachers, and distributed stockpiles of specialized explosives. For most of the ride, Morton sat at his desk, questioning whether the risk he was taking was worth the reward. He tried watching the map and videos of the creature destroying fields full of people, but he had to do so with the roof down because the sun washed out the images, so eventually, he closed his eyes and imagined his hands around the Matron’s throat.
When the southern ridge of the valley finally came into view, tens of thousands of vehicles were positioned on top of it. “Idiots,” Morton grumbled. He didn’t need military pre-ed to recognize sheep lining up to be slaughtered. Defending the high ground might have made sense if they were facing a traditional army, but anyone who’d been paying attention to the creature’s rampage should have known that the elevation would be no obstacle for this monster. Nothing slowed it down; not mountains, rivers, valleys, and certainly not poachers.
Behind the pointless line of defense was a wide empty basin and a much taller mountain range on the far side. Upon approach, as they had been instructed, his posse drew as much attention to themselves as they could, trying to rally even more teams to follow them back. Many were riding on top of their vehicles, waving skins and flags as they hollered insults and unflattering come-ons. With the train’s shield down, riding in flatcar mode, Frank stood at the front of the deck, headbanging to some classical music he was blasting over the loudspeaker. A little farther back, strapped into his exosuit, Mister Morton was standing against the wind as he yelled into a microphone, “Follow me, dumbasses!” It wasn’t the most convincing speech, he knew, and he had thought about putting more effort into it, but he didn’t care. Poachers didn’t like being told what to do. If they wanted to follow Wolfchan’s orders instead of his good example, so be it.
A few more teams of poachers chose to follow Morton’s caravan as they rode through the line, continued straight across the basin, and went as high up the secondary range as their vehicles would allow. One by one they stopped, and the poachers rigged their carriers, buggies, and bikes with the explosives that Frank had provided before continuing to climb up on foot. The floating train got fairly close to the mountain’s top, on a steep section of hard rock, and then they transformed it into ‘battlement mode’. Extra armor plating guarded the front three with one contiguous slot window wrapping all the way around so poachers could fire handheld weapons. Frank would be manning the turrets from his terminal, while Morton’s job was to sit at his desk and wait until exactly the right moment. The plan was risky, and they would only get one shot, but Morton and Frank were both confident it would work.
From what they had seen on the videos, Frank didn’t expect any of his weaponry to hurt the creature. The explosives set in the abandoned vehicles were all designed to slow, snare, freeze, or inhibit in some way. His hope was that the improvised minefield would give them a few extra fractions of a second to activate the shield and escape whatever that thing was. There was still a possibility that the Matron was watching via means that the force field could not block, but Frank was more worried about whether it could physically withstand something as fast as the creature. Morton said he didn’t plan on finding out, but he wanted to wait until it was practically upon them to increase the chances of the Matron thinking he was dead.
The train couldn’t fly, but from their current elevation, it would be able to coast over the valley, above where the monster could reach them. If that worked, they would then cut back towards the already ravaged lands and disappear into a system of secret tunnels that the poachers used to transport their wares. The train hadn’t been designed to hold so many people, and the window seats quickly filled up. It got so crowded that Frank considered telling some of them to get on the roof, but he worried they might interfere with the shield when it was time to turn it back on.
Standing room between battle stations was densely packed, and there were another two long hours of waiting after everything was set. The air inside the cabin became st
agnant and the poachers visibly more anxious. For a while, Morton stayed focused on the red stain creeping towards them on the map, but eventually, he got sucked back into watching the unending stream of video clips depicting the creature’s slaughter. At one point, he asked rhetorically, “Is it just me? Or does that thing look bigger than it did yesterday?”
Frank had been thinking the same thing but didn’t reply. He couldn’t mute Wolfchan’s narration or disable the video, but for the sake of morale, he threw a large canvas drop cloth over the train’s main monitor and went back to his station. Silently, everyone sat with eyes glued to the map. When the red stain started getting close to the far side of the valley, they turned to watch the ridge instead. The last two minutes of waiting were horrible, and then the long line of poachers began to fire.
Thousands of yells and screams came over the comms as the monster tore through them like a string of firecrackers. Vehicles exploded from brief but heavy impact with the creature, which moved so fast that even those firing from the far end only got off a few rounds before being eaten. As soon as the creature was done with the first line of defense, it turned straight towards the train. There was no question about it, the monster knew exactly where they were. Like lightning, it zigged and zagged between the poacher vehicles that were scattered across the valley floor and then shot up the mountain’s base.
Morton’s eye twitched; watching the creature move in real life was far more terrifying than it had been on-screen. With the hard and steady voice of a true commander, Morton said, “Ready...”
Without needing a second command, the poachers drew their weapons and fired as the werwolf continued towards them. Had they been watching Wolfchan’s feed, they would have seen practically the same view, as she had begun broadcasting from a camera onboard the Silver Bullet as it approached. All of Frank’s best lasers, blasters, phasers—even those antique metal bullet guns—fired from the turrets and windows but nothing seemed to have any effect. Three giant gobs from the goo-gun hit the creature square in the face, but the substance seemed to burn off with a crackling of energy.
Under the Shadow of the Plateau: Frontier Forever Page 28
