Hank laughed. “I’m surprised that no one ever smacked you upside the head, Andie.”
Dick laughed louder. “She smacks back, dumb ass!”
They went back inside and ate a meal of MREs and drank cold beer. The first thing the next morning, they were part of a convoy of a half dozen ATVs. Each ATV had a driver and a sidecar for a passenger. It took about an hour to travel more than a dozen miles north, where they stopped. Hank looked around at the eight men with them, all of whom faced outwards and were scanning the sky.
“This seems -- excessive,” he told Andie.
“Two of our guards have been killed by dralka. It colors their thinking. Since the last fatal attack, there’s barely been a week without someone attacked.”
Dick waved at the view in front of them. “This is awesome -- particularly for a railroader. How far north do these benches go?”
“All the way, although there are a half dozen major river valleys between here and there, and a couple of dozen smaller ones. I can’t stress too much that the geologists say that this planet is old, geologically. One of the geologists was telling me that these are like ‘bathtub rings’ marking ancient shorelines. It is remarkable that the highest ‘ring’ is about 2500 feet or so above the current sea level. Of course, the tides here are something fierce; forty and fifty feet a day. Still, either the peninsula is being pushed up or the ocean level has dropped quite a bit.
“I’ve asked the locals about earthquakes, and they’ve never heard of them and don’t know what they are. They know about volcanoes, but they call them “fire lakes,” and none of them have erupted during their history. We don’t know enough about the planet to know if there are icecaps at the poles, but the weather stays moderate at least to forty-five degrees north latitude.”
“By old, does that mean that the grades into the river valleys are low?”
“That it does. A typical valley, at the altitude of this bench, drops a mile in five miles, and then climbs back.”
Dick was sarcastic. “That’s a twenty percent slope, Andie. You’d kill any train crew who tried it.”
“Sure, if you were counting like the locals, from the ridgelines. But the benches cut into the ridges so it’s mostly a five hundred foot drop over five miles, and the last two hundred foot drop is at the river itself. Most of those rivers would require two hundred foot or shorter trestles. And that’s less than a three percent grade.”
“Put like that,” Dick told her, “you’re right, plus we contour down the slope -- we don’t go down a slope in a straight line.” He shuddered theatrically. “No, this is one percent, Andie.”
“Is it doable?” she inquired.
“It’s doable,” he confirmed. He paused. “Andie, you need a real railroad here, not something only a little more than one step up from a hobby line.”
“And I didn’t want to put you guys off. It’s going to take the local people a year, maybe two, to start producing their own rails and their own ties. There’s no way to get a serious engine through the door, so they’re going to have to make those here, as well.
“You have to understand that until now, they’ve used a couple of tons of steel a year. All of a sudden they need thousands of tons. Cannon, rifles, rails, engines, rolling stock, ship fittings -- it’s a tidy sum.”
“You say they have plenty of timber and coal?” Dick asked.
“You’ve seen one of the coal seams. That one is five hundred feet thick, and so far as I know, it runs for nearly four hundred miles north. I have no idea how deep it goes. Right there -- assuming we just scoop the top hundred yards, that’s nearly 14 billion cubic yards -- nearly three cubic miles -- of coal. There are at least four more strata like that along this finger, and half of those are thicker. And, I might add, its anthracite.”
“Bituminous would be better,” Hank told her.
Andie raised her eyebrow. “I thought the harder the coal, the more energy it released.”
“There are other considerations,” he told her.
Andie grinned. “Well, the reason I didn’t tout the other layers of coal is that they’re soft.”
Hank grinned. “One of these days, Andie, the bug will bite you. You’re too close not to be bit. When that happens, you come and see me. I’ll bring you along.”
“Linda does that quite well,” Andie said with a laugh.
“No, not like that -- but I’ll tell you, after my wife died, putting my hand on throttle of Liberty 176 cured a lot of my ills.”
“But not all them.”
“No, not all of them. By then I had come by my fair share of self-inflicted ills. I don’t wish that on anyone, Andie.”
“Well, I don’t wish it on me, either.” She waved ahead of them.
“We’re going back in a few minutes. Tomorrow we’ll continue north, if you’re both willing to sign onto this project. I’ll need estimates of what it’s going to cost, what’s going to take and how long it’s going to take.”
“Five hundred miles of fifteen inch track,” Dick told her. “Call it a million dollars per hundred miles for the steel and ties. I’ll have it installed on a graded bed in a year. Labor... here, I’d just be guessing. Call it two thousand men for a year. Two years if you want to double track. With less labor, it would take longer. More would probably get in each other’s way.”
“We have all the money in the universe, at least for now,” she told him. “The King estimates he has twelve tons of gold that he would dearly like to trade for twelve tons of copper. Currently I’ve committed about five hundred pounds of that. Right now your budget is essentially unlimited if you can do things quickly.”
Dick looked north. “While these benches are great and wonderful, the fact remains that they still need to be surveyed. There’s not much you can do to hurry a survey, when you don’t have either end of the line surveyed.”
“We don’t have either end surveyed,” Andie told him.
“Well we could go from both ends at once,” Dick told her, “but there is a non-trivial risk that the two ends wouldn’t meet.”
“Okay, so we use two survey crews anyway and tell them to be really careful. They survey all but the last fifty miles between crews, and then we combine crews and work towards a target. How long?”
“Yeah, it’s four hundred miles. It’ll be at least five hundred before you’re done. Ten miles a week from each crew once they get rolling. And, if the security you’ve got for us is an indication, there will be a lot of guards.”
“Twenty-five weeks?”
“At least,” he told her, “plus the bridges will cost time... the survey is going to let us know how much that will cost.”
One of the guards lofted a radio in his hand. “Andie? Linda for you. She says it’s urgent.”
The two men and Andie went over, and the guard handed her the radio. “Linda?”
There was a brief pause. “Is she all right?”
Another pause. “What? What did you say?”
Andie dropped the radio on the ground, looking dazed. She looked around and walked over to a boulder that stuck a couple of feet from the ground. Without warning her hand lashed out in a punch against the rock.
Hank went up to her. “Andie?”
He saw she had tears in her eyes and was cradling her hand. She’d hit the rock very, very hard.
“Medic!” he called, as he’d been told. An earnest young man in combat fatigues trotted up. Andie ignored him as he examined her hand.
Tears streaked down here cheeks, and up close he could hear her saying, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
“Is your friend all right?” he asked, assuming something that didn’t even come close to the worst possible event.
Andie looked at him and turned away, sobbing. Hank had been there and done that. He stooped down and pick up the radio.
“This is Hank, who’s this?”
“Linda Walsh. Hank, what’s happening?”
“Andie’s lost it,” he said brutally, his eyes on the young girl.
“What did you just tell her?”
“They called Kris out on a rescue. She, Ezra, Kurt and a dozen others went to Chicago to help get back five people pulled into a door.” He heard what he was sure was Linda swallowing.
“Is Andie all right?” Linda asked.
“She punched a rock with her fist; the medic is looking after her hand. I’m pretty sure she busted up her hand. Is her friend okay?”
“Our people returned without injury. The lost stayed lost. Hank, the President nuked Chicago.”
Hank yelped. “He did what?”
“They used two fuel air bombs, MOABs, Ezra said they are called. Then a third weapon, which he is sure was nuke, but the government says it was just another bomb like the first two. It wasn’t a very big nuke, an enhanced radiation weapon, from the descriptions.”
“My God, why would he have ordered something like that?”
“Because whoever was on the other side tried to gas the rescuers the first time they opened the door, and before Kris got the door closed, followed that up with a chemical and biological attack on this side. The President scotched any contamination issues.”
“My God!” Hank said, repeating himself.
“Kris says that they’d evacuated everyone out to two miles, but there are always idiots, so a couple more people were killed and another handful injured. Because of Kris, they had plenty of time to evacuate, and the loss of life was very low. But she’s afraid the President will use this as an excuse to crack down even more on the doors.”
Hank’s mind raced. “There’s no way the President could survive the accusation that he’d ordered a nuclear strike on the US.” The cherries came up, three of them. “What’s being reported?”
“They say that three conventional weapons were used to immolate the target -- there was no mention of nuclear weapons used. Kurt and Ezra both say that the government covered it up with the larger fuel-air bombs.”
Hank looked at the medic who’d been wrapping Andie’s hand, and he told Linda that they were ready to come in. “Let me talk to Andie for a second, please,” Linda told Hank.
“Linda, right now her hands are both busy. Can I put this on the speaker?”
“Sure.”
Hank turned up the volume.
“I just got a call a second ago from Kris’ mother,” Linda told Andie. You need to get in here right away; this is way, way beyond dynamite. A metaphorical nuclear weapon this time. Come as fast as you can.”
“The medic says I’m going to have to go back through to Earth, Linda. I’ve really messed up my hand. Remind me to hit a pillow the next time I lose my temper.”
“Sure, I’ll alert the other side. But I’ve only heard a few minutes of this, and evidently I haven’t gotten to the good part yet. The President has forbidden Kris from consulting on any further Far Side rescues, though.”
“What! I’ll kill the fucker!”
Linda sighed. “You can’t say that, sweetie, even as a joke. From what Helen said, though, Kris really did something worse to him. Something, she says, like your F-bomb, only worse.”
“We’re a dozen miles away; it’s going to take an hour, I’m afraid.”
“Come, but don’t take any chances.”
They headed back for the rookery, traveling maybe a mile an hour faster than they’d gone on the outbound trip. Each bump caused Andie to wince, even after she’d taken to riding with her hand up in the air to cushion it better.
They walked into the cave system and right through to Earth. “What happened?” Andie asked.
Linda smiled. “You have to hear it yourself. I never knew Kris had a temper, too. The President really got her upset.”
“She’s got a stiff upper lip all right,” Andie agreed. “And then she just goes berserk.”
“Well, this was a cold, deliberate shot from ambush. It’s incredible. Come to the infirmary and they’ll look at your hand, and you can listen to a tape of what Kris said while they work.”
Hank and Dick tagged along, curious as to just what Linda was talking about. Neither of them had seen anything but pictures of Kris Boyle, but she didn’t look particularly mean and nasty, and the word berserk, they agreed, they had trouble imagining applying to her.
“Kris evidently agreed to an interview by a local Chicago TV station. Somehow she got them to play it live, without tape delay.”
“Oh? She was being lady-like today?” Andie said with a laugh.
“She must have fooled them at first, but not so you’d notice at the end. Listen.”
She cranked up a laptop, playing input from a Tivo through it.
The woman interviewer was in the process of introducing Kris and giving a brief summary of the morning’s events when a man in a suit appeared on the interview set. He flipped out a leather wallet, with an ID card and badge. “Terrance Creighton, supervisory US Marshal. You’re Kristina Boyle?”
Kris allowed that she was Kristine Boyle. He handed her a piece of paper. “Miss Boyle, you are served. That’s a writ from the Supreme Court of the United States enjoining you from taking part in any future actions involving fusors or traveling off-world, or consulting about such things.”
Hank saw the young woman stare at the man for a moment and then turn to the interviewer. “I apologize for the interruption. I’m sorry to say that the President and I don’t seem to hit it off; we rub each other the wrong way.
“However, he is the President, and it’s not for me to judge his actions. Now, where were we?”
Andie frowned. “I’d have thought Kris would explode,” she said.
“Patience,” Linda told her. “This was beautifully played, just brilliantly.”
Andie raised an eyebrow, while Hank was wondering what was beautiful about caving in like a weak reed.
The discussion turned to the events of the morning, and Kris explained her thinking and the events. At the end, the interviewer went where Kris had evidently been hoping and waiting for. “And do you think, Miss Boyle, that the bombing was justified?”
Kris nodded thoughtfully. “I’d already been thinking of asking the military advisor they’d sent us if something like that could be set up, but events got out of hand very quickly at the end. I have only one quibble, but that’s just me.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes, the plan the President used called for the detonation of what I understand were two fuel-air bombs, called MOABs -- the Mother of all Bombs, and then a final weapon, which I believe was an enhanced radiation weapon. I believe that the dust and debris kicked up by the first detonations probably prevented any of the radiation from the nuclear explosion reaching the ground.”
“The Air Force said that three fuel-air weapons were employed.”
“Well, yes. Me, I’d have used the enhanced radiation weapon first, and then the MOABs, but that’s just me.”
“The Air Force says there were three fuel-air weapons,” the interviewer repeated, a little nervously.
Kris smiled slightly. “I imagine they say that because the President would have a tough time explaining to his hometown constituents why he nuked their city.”
Abruptly the screen went black. “They finally wised up that she was playing them,” Linda told them. “It’s been almost two hours since that ran. Amongst other things, the National Council of Governors and the National Council of Mayors have both sent letters requesting information on the weapons actually used. Not to mention that the acting President of the Senate has called the Senate into emergency session tomorrow, and the Speaker of the House has called them back, as well.”
“It must not have been a very big nuke,” Andie mused.
“No, and Kris made it clear that she was thinking of the same thing, herself. Her disagreement was with the sequence. Of course, she wasn’t the person who ordered the strike. Helen says that Oliver’s lawyers will be at the Supreme Court tomorrow asking the government to show cause why the injunction against Kris shouldn’t be voided.”
“She really cold
-cocked him, didn’t she?” Andie said with a laugh. “Tough shit, the fucker had it coming.”
“It did seem a little extreme,” Hank said, carefully.
Andie laughed. “You see Linda and me standing together?”
“Yes,” he said warily.
“Imagine me as King Zod, telling my faithful button man at my side to rub you out; the button man standing about where Linda is. The button man drew a knife and stepped forward towards Kris. The instant the fucker moved, Kris lifted her hand and put a 9 mil slug right through his forehead! Made a hell of mess! It spattered the King and his generals. The King lost it then, demanding that his generals attack Kris. One of them slid his sword right through the King’s gut, saying that no proper King orders his army to attack women.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, shit.
“One day we’ll get up to Arvala. You’ll meet Chaba, the slave that Kris freed. She was running from her master and fell into a ravine a few feet from Kris. Her master came to the edge, saw her, and lifted his musket to kill her. I could see him, and I was fucking frozen, I was so terrified. Kris shot that fucker dead too; she nearly took his head off.”
“Remind me not to make her angry,” Hank said.
Andie laughed. “Oh, keep me happy, and you’ll keep Kris happy. Not to worry! Build me a railroad! Yesterday would have been nice. Today would be okay, even though I know I have to settle for tomorrow.”
* * *
The news for Andie about her hand wasn’t good. She’d cracked a couple of knuckles and had stress fractures on some of her finger and wrist bones. It was frustrating, because they put a cast on her right hand that immobilized her wrist and prevented all but the smallest movement of her fingers.
In spite of the injury, Andie insisted on going north to Arvala as soon as possible, which meant a three day delay for things to be sorted out. Linda talked with a couple of people back on Earth, and three bronzed, buff young men, their hair bleached blonde by the sun, appeared through the Far Side door. Instead of taking ATV’s north, they rode in the catamaran that Andie was going to give to the King of Arvala.
The Far Side Page 68
