by Edward Aubry
"What's happening?" asked Glimmer. Her attempt to minimize the concern in her voice was obvious and ineffectual.
"It's not letting me stop the train. It still wants to take us to Chicago." Harrison was silent for a few moments, then he began using the screen again to examine their situation. "As near as I can tell," he said after a bit, "the system is acknowledging that the Milwaukee locks are closed. It still intends to send us through that station without flinching."
"What does that mean?"
"It means," he said steadily, "I think, that we are going to crash. In about …" He looked at a monitor that displayed a map of the route with a lighted indicator showing their location. "in about, oh, ninety minutes or so."
Neither of them spoke for what seemed like a very long time. Harrison was the first to break the silence. "Is this where you say I told you so?"
Glimmer scowled. "I should think I deserve a bit more credit than that."
"Right. Sorry."
"Can't we just turn the train off?" she asked.
"You mean shut down the power? I don't know. I can try. The problem, though, is that even if I can, we're in a frictionless environment. If I cut the power right now, I'm not sure how far we would coast. Maybe the whole way to Milwaukee." He thought for a minute. "What we really need is a way to stop the train at one of the stations as we pass through it." He looked around the sparsely equipped room. "I'll bet there's some kind of emergency brake we can pull. There's got to be some way to stop the train manually if everything else goes wrong." Minutes later, he found what he was looking for. It was a pull handle near the doorway. It was labeled discretely, but its purpose was clear. He went back to the monitors to check their position. They were already closing in on the Erie Station. He was able to bring up a display that gave a running estimate of their arrival time. They would be there in just under five minutes. "Damn," he said. "This thing is fast."
"What if we stop the train," Glimmer asked, "but we can't get the tunnel doors to close? You guys need air, don't you?"
Harrison had thought of that, but he wasn't ready to confront it yet. "There's got to be a way to get out," he said. "Maybe there's an escape pod, or spacesuits, or something." He looked around. "Anyway, I think we've got several days' worth of air and food in here. I think we'll have plenty of time to sort that out. I'd rather worry about that than worry about crashing." He got up, went to the handle, rested his hand on it. "Tell me when we get within thirty seconds of Erie."
Glimmer stood on the control panel, watching the screen. "Soon," she said. "Very soon. Very, very soon. Very-now!"
Harrison squeezed the handle, hard. For a moment, he was completely frozen, unable to focus on anything but the handle. The moment passed. Nothing happened.
"Harry? What's going on?"
"Nothing."
"Yes, dear," she said. "I can see that. I mean, why is nothing going on?"
"Not here," he said. "We'll do it at Toledo Station."
Glimmer was not pleased. "This is not a game you want to be playing right now, Harrison."
"It's not a game," he said without apology. "Look, if this works, then we're way better off doing it that much closer to where we're actually going, and if it doesn't work, it won't make a difference. It was the right call."
"And just what is your backup plan if it doesn't work? I sure hope you don't need those extra few minutes to think of one."
"Relax, will you? We're going to be all right."
"Oh, really?" she asked. "That's very comforting. While you're basking in that certainty, I'll let you roll this bit of information around. If we hit that sealed door, at-" she checked a figure on the monitor, "305 meters per second? If this thing splits open, or crumples up like a wad of paper? Do you know what will happen to me?"
This was not a topic he really wanted to consider. "No," he said simply, hoping she might not tell him.
She flew to his face, hovered right in front of his nose, and whispered, "Nothing at all. Not a scratch. So don't tell me," she said grimly, "to relax."
Harrison felt like a fool. He had assumed that Glimmer's uneasiness, her fear, had been for her own safety. It never had been.
They rode in silence to Toledo. As they passed through Cleveland Station, intermittent light from the platform flashed into the train, a sharp reminder of their speed. As they approached their goal, Glimmer again gave Harrison a countdown, of sorts. "Wait for it," she said. "Almost. Almost. Wait for it. Aaaaaand-NOW!"
This time Harrison pulled, throwing his whole body weight into it. The handle came straight down and some internal mechanism engaged with a hefty metallic click.
And again, although it took them both some time to fully understand it, nothing happened.
"Oh, fuck," said Harrison.
"Watch the boy," said Glimmer. She shot out of the caboose toward the front of the train, leaving her signature sparkling trail, purple this time.
Harrison wasn't quite sure what else to do, so he followed her last instruction. Mitchell was still asleep, curled up on the couch with a blanket draped over him. Harrison wondered if he had done that himself, or if Glimmer had somehow covered him as he slept. While he waited for her to do whatever she needed to do just then, he paced and tried to reorganize his thoughts. In a little over an hour, he and Mitchell would be raspberry jam, and Glimmer would be inconsolably pissed.
Five minutes later, she came flitting back into the car. "Well," she said, "I was wrong about one thing. If we hit that door, I'm dead as a dishrag."
Harrison was not sure what the appropriate response to that might be. "Where were you?" he tried.
"Milwaukee," she said. "We have a problem."
Harrison was stunned. "What? How fast can you fly?"
"Pretty fast," she said. "Listen, if we can't get this worm thingy stopped, we are seriously screwed."
Harrison felt a moment of head-rush vertigo. He raised his hands slightly to balance himself. "Wait," he said. "Are you telling me that you could have flown to Chicago any time-"
She snapped her fingers in his face. It sounded like a rifle shot. "FOCUS! The tunnel is magicked up! This is a major problem!"
Harrison felt sweat building on his forehead. He imagined he was probably getting pale. "Magicked up? What the hell does that mean?"
"I mean there's a spell in the tunnel, right in front of the door. You can see it shimmering. I'm pretty sure it's some variation on a shield curse, which pretty much means that if we make contact with it, we're toast. The worst part is, we won't even have to hit it all that hard." She was talking quickly, though with relative calm. "So the bottom line is we either need to find a way off this beast or find a way to stop it."
Harrison took a deep breath, willing the blood back into his brain. "Please tell me that this is the sort of thing that happens to tunnels all the time, by accident," he said. She shook her head. "Are we at 'I told you so' yet?"
"Is that really where you want to be?" she replied acidly. "Snap out of it, Harry! We've got a big problem to solve. And about an hour to solve it. If you want, I'll rake you over the coals about this relentlessly all the way to Chicago. But not now."
"Right." He pushed through the dizziness, and wiped the sweat off his face. He would have plenty of time to faint later. Right now, he needed to be in top form. "Whether we get off or stop, we have to do it near a station," he said, "because Mitchell and I won't be able to walk hundreds of miles through the tunnel."
"Yeah, I thought of that, too," she said. "Would you rather abandon ship or try to stop it?"
Harrison mulled those two options. "I don't remember seeing any provisions for escape in the information I looked at. I'm sure there are some, but I'm not sure I'd find them in time. You could cover more ground alone, so you should check out our escape options while I try to slow us down. I have a couple of ideas I want to try. Do you know what you're looking for?"
She nodded. "Some kind of lifeboat situation."
"Yeah. I'm going to get to work."
/>
* * *
He made some progress over the next half hour. He tried twice more to reprogram the train's course, but that was just an exercise in convincing himself he couldn't do it. Then it occurred to him Glimmer's idea of cutting the power might have some small merit, after all. He couldn't redirect the train, and he couldn't shut the power down completely, but he did find a way to persuade the system that the magnetic rail needed to be deactivated for maintenance. Without the constant pull, every corner bled a tiny bit of momentum from the Worm, and he watched the speed gauge drop slowly from 305 down to 299 meters per second. "Well," he said, "it's a start."
Glimmer, meanwhile, had returned with bad news. The train was indeed designed to hold several small escape vehicles. Unfortunately none of them were where they were supposed to be. Either they had been used already, or they had never been installed.
By the time Harrison had discovered how to disable the rail and learned that escape was not an immediate option, they were well into Canada. He tried not to think about how far this detour was going to set them back, once they finally got the train stopped, but it haunted him. It also aggravated the fact that he was already under too much pressure. And then he realized that pressure might just be the solution. He explored some of the menus he had glossed over earlier while he was trying to get the train moving.
"I think I've got it," he finally said.
"Tell me."
"It's here in the maintenance options," he explained. "Every section of tunnel is peppered with hundreds of hatches leading to what they call snorkel tubes leading to the surface. They're for emergencies or repair problems or any reason why you might want to flood the tunnel with air. I've already got the system alerted to a maintenance problem, so it should be possible to pop all the hatches between Milwaukee and Green Bay."
"Are you doing that so that you can breathe when you get out?" she asked, not completely following.
"Well, yeah," he said. "Partly that. But more to the point, if I'm right, having air in the tube will create drag, which will slow us down more, and if I vent the tunnel only ahead of us, it should send a pressure wave down the tube. Basically, a big wall of air which will swat the train. Maybe stop it."
"Swat it how hard?" She sounded skeptical.
"Pretty hard. It might actually be moving at the speed of sound, depending on how much air is coming in. I think."
"Sound has a speed?" She was starting to look lost.
"Yes, it does," he said patiently. "It moves a little bit faster than we're going right now. If the pressure wave hits us that fast, we'll feel it, and it probably won't be fun. But hopefully it won't hurt too much."
"Do it. We're almost out of time."
He did. Opening the hatches turned out to be one of the easier commands, most likely made easier by the earlier maintenance report. There would still be some lag time between opening the hatches and feeling the difference. "You should wake Mitchell up. It's about to get pretty shaky in here."
A couple of minutes later, Glimmer returned with Mitchell, bleary eyed, still in his pajamas. "What's going on?" he yawned. "Are we there yet?"
"Not yet," said Harrison, "but almost. We're about to hit a bump in the road, and I wanted to be sure you were ready for it." Harrison escorted him back to the lounge, and found a secure, well-cushioned seat facing the rear of the Worm. He planted Mitchell in it, and then covered his lap with throw pillows. The boy started to nod off again, and Harrison was torn between letting him do so and making sure he was alert when the air wave hit. "Hey, Tiger," he said, "I need you to stay awake for a few minutes. Once we get over this bump, you can go back to sleep, okay?" Mitchell nodded, eyes half open. That would have to do.
They sat and waited. "What happens now?" Glimmer asked.
"If I timed it right, we should run into some serious drag right about halfway between Sault Ste. Marie and Green Bay. Hopefully, that will bring us to a stop within walking distance of the station." He sat up sharply. "Oh my God. I just thought of something. That trick you do with eardrums, can you do it in reverse?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, can you block sound instead of creating it?"
She considered for a second. "Yeah, I guess I can do that, but it's not exactly the same trick. I can put up a barrier in your ears so that your eardrums don't respond to anything."
"I need you to do that to me and Mitchell. When that wall of air hits, it might be dangerously loud in here for a little while."
"Okay. You want me to do that now?"
"Please." His ears went immediately blank. There had been subtle background noise before, but it was gone now. It was not the same experience as wearing earplugs, because he couldn't even hear the ocean-like sound of his own biology. He looked in on Mitchell, who had taken advantage of the silence by falling asleep again. Harrison debated waking him, but realized that without his hearing, he would only get scared, which would be counterproductive.
And then the train shook, hard. Harrison was thrown into the back of his seat and pressed there firmly. He looked over at Mitchell, who had awakened. His mouth was wide open. He was probably screaming. It was impossible to know, and must have been impossible for the boy to know, either. He would have to iron that out as soon as possible. The last thing he wanted for that poor kid was what was happening to him right now.
Several, but not all, of the windows were cracked, but none had shattered, testimony to their solid design. The train was vibrating fiercely. Harrison caught Glimmer's eye. She appeared to be in shock. Her eyes were bugged out and she had her hands over her ears. He waved until he was sure he had her attention, and then pointed at Mitchell. She came to and gave him a thumbs-up, then lighted on Mitchell's lap. Harrison saw her do something sparkly, but wasn't able to concentrate on what it was. He pulled himself out of his seat and crawled into the caboose.
He managed to make it to the seat at the control panel. The speed gauge had dropped dramatically and was continuing to do so. So far, they had dropped down to 220 meters per second. He checked their deceleration against his watch: 216, 212, 208. They were losing about four meters per second, squared. Almost half a gee. He didn't like how that felt and could only imagine what the kid was experiencing. As he watched, the time between four meter increments grew longer. He hoped that was not significant, but after a full minute, the train had slowed to 120 meters per second and was barely slowing at all past that. The sleek design, which he had thought was just for show, was now serving a purpose. It was working against them. With the deceleration slowed to almost nothing, he was able to get up with ease and walk back to the lounge.
Mitchell was sleeping again. Glimmer had, presumably, given him some sort of magical sedative. She began talking animatedly to Harrison. He pointed to his ear, and she slapped her forehead and waved her hands. As his hearing returned, he could hear the low rumble of the train speeding through air. Over that sound, he heard Glimmer shout, "Holy shit! That was loud!"
He nodded. "I didn't hear it, but I assume it was a sonic boom. We just hit a wall of air with a combined velocity of almost mach two. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," she said. "I love surprises."
It was impossible to tell if she was being sarcastic, so he didn't even try. "It slowed us down," he said, "but nowhere near enough, and we've passed the point where our drag can overcome our momentum. We're not going to be able to stop at Green Bay, which means we need a plan for how to get into Milwaukee Station without hitting that damned barricade." As he watched Mitchell fitfully sleeping away the crisis, Harrison's fear was transforming into rage. Someone was trying to kill him. He could accept that, somehow. But that someone would sacrifice this little kid to do it was beyond horrific. "What happens when an object hits a shield curse?"
"Could be lots of things," said Glimmer. "Hard to say with something this big. The most likely is that it would disintegrate." She gave it more thought. "Or maybe just shred. I've seen that. Sometimes they compress; that's a sight, let
me tell you."
Harrison fought his nausea. "What happens to the shield?"
"Oh. It disappears. Pretty much always, if you hit it hard enough. They don't last long anyway, but as soon as they take one good smack, that's it."
"That's good." He was pondering, calculating.
"How is that good if we disappear, too?" she asked.
"It's good if we're not the object that hits the shield, that's how. If we can knock out the curse, I might be able to get the door back open." He marched back into the caboose. "I need to find something I can throw at it," he said. "A maintenance drone. A missile. Something."
Cursory examination of the specs for the train and the tunnel revealed that there were no convenient robots in the tunnel for suicide runs, and the train itself was completely unarmed. Neither fact surprised Harrison, but both disappointed him. Then he had an epiphany. "This train is segmented," he said. "It looks contiguous from outside, but the cars are clearly separate." He started bringing up control menus, looking for anything that qualified as an emergency procedure. After a few minutes, he found what he was looking for.
"This is it," he said calmly. "We're going to cut the train in half."
At that moment, the train slipped into Green Bay Station. It was no longer their goal, and Harrison had stopped thinking about it, but seeing it glide by was sobering. They were moving slowly enough that they could make out some detail. He hoped it would not be the last thing they ever saw.
"Slowing down has bought us a little bit of time," he said, "but not much. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to sever the connection between two cars in the middle of the train. We'll seal off the lounge car, but I'll leave the other hatches open. Try to increase drag on the back half of the train as much as possible. With luck, the front end will pull away from us, hit the barricade, and take it out. Then," he paused and sighed. "Then … well, then we crash. But at least we crash into the station, and not some big magic bug lamp."
