The Steam Mole

by Dave Freer

  Rainor scrawled his signature.

  “Right. We’ll need a couple of witnesses,” said the captain. “You, miss.” He pointed at Linda. “You are not one of the crew. Write ‘witnessed by,’ and sign it, please.”

  Linda did, despite her horror at the idea of them taking money and leaving. But she had to complain. “You can’t do this, Captain Malkis. The police…Clara…”

  He winked at her. “We can deal with that. Lieutenant, please sign it too.”

  Lieutenant Ambrose did, while Linda was still wondering about it all.

  “Right,” said the captain. “I think you can escort Mr. Robert Rainor to Ceduna Central, Lieutenant. They should at the very least be able to hold him on the intent to pervert the course of justice on the basis of this offer. Might manage bribery charges, too, as you Cuttlefish crewmen are now police officers.”

  “I can’t begin to tell you how much trouble you are going to be in,” snarled Mr. Rainor, as he realized he was being escorted to the police station and not to the harbor.

  Linda could imagine. The big six companies had huge influence and controlled nearly everything.

  That didn’t seem to worry the captain, or Dr. Calland. The captain laughed grimly into the man’s face. “You’ve lived too long in a world where everything has a price, Rainor. The lives and honor of my men are not for sale. I might have let you loose, if you hadn’t tried that. You’ll try to bribe and lawyer your way free, no doubt. I think we’ll go and call on your friend Senator Wattly, too, before you start squalling about wrongful arrest. You can claim we forced it from you, but then you’re going to have to explain your earlier cover-up. You find yourself on the receiving end of what you were doing, Rainor. You’ve got away with this sort of thing for too long, and I’m guessing this will be the dam-burst. You’ll find your staff telling the story of the boss running away and sneaking out of the back door to everyone they know. And a fair amount else, I suspect, or I’ve no experience of being in command of men.”

  “Wait until my lawyers get into you,” snarled the man.

  “They’ll have to come north to find me,” said the captain. “I have one of my crew to search for, and a young lady to find.”

  “Your Grace, the news in from Queensland isn’t positive. They’ve so far recaptured or killed all the escapees but four. Unfortunately, some of those killed early on, before orders were given that Jack Calland was to be taken alive, were just shot and left where they fell. And in the tropics…well, the bodies are in no state to be identified. One of those may be Calland. Or not. The captured prisoners…They are aware that they’re in danger of being shot. And somehow that we’re after one prisoner, alive. So they’re not being cooperative about identifying themselves.”

  Duke Malcolm pursed his lips, shook his head, and sighed in irritation. “And of course there are still four missing. They’ve been gone nearly four days now. Calland could be one of those, I suppose, knowing the luck we’ve had so far. Well, what chances do they have of capturing them? Does Colonel Debrett in Queensland give any assessment?”

  “They’ve got some aboriginal trackers on the job now, Your Grace. They’re exceptional trackers, the natives, and are going to find them, if possible. But a lot of the prisoners are aboriginals too, and it could be that those are the escapees, and Calland could be dead or in custody already. It’s harsh country. The only positive thing seems to be that they’re sure they’ve stopped them before they got farther east to the more populated areas. They’re fairly certain the prisoners are inside their cordon. They’ve had to use some men from the Hussars to make it effective. Those were men who were being saved for the push to Sheba.” The officer sighed. “It’s a mess, Your Grace.”

  Duke Malcolm did, at times, appreciate frankness like that. Especially when it concurred with his own conclusions. “Keep me posted. How are the military preparations going otherwise?”

  The duke could see the major’s shoulders lift slightly. “They have set things forward just in case there have been any leaks. It should, however, take a while for the rumor, let alone news, to percolate through to Western Australia. They’re waiting on a last fuel delivery. Unfortunately, the vessel has been delayed at sea.”

  Rested, rehydrated, even better fed than he’d been in a while, but very stiff, Jack struggled to get walking that evening. The cold, cooked big lizard tasted rather more like lizard than chicken in the afternoon. They’d wrapped it in leaves and buried it to keep the flies off, so it had added eucalyptus flavor and sand crunch. It was food, however, and they ate as they walked. Once his muscles warmed and loosened up he began to try to draw the boy out as they walked west under the stars.

  “Once we get away from the soldiers where are you going to go?” Jack asked.

  “Not sure. Got some cousins down Jericho way working as stockmen. That’s what Pa did when me ma was alive. Maybe I’ll go to look for them. I’d go to me uncle, but he got killed by some railway-man near Boulia. Railway-man was out shootin’ and he saw my uncle and shot ’im. He was good bloke, my uncle. My ma’s people. He took me in the bush, taught me how to be a man. I live with him for three years. Otherwise…I don’ know. My da’s woman, she don’t want me back, ’cept to steal for her. And she tol’ the coppers I done it and it my fault.” Lampy scowled. “It wasn’t. When the drink gets in him he was bad. Ain’t going back there. Anyway, that’s where they’d come look for me.”

  “Won’t they look with your cousins?” asked Jack.

  “Aw, they think we all look the same. And me cousins ain’t going to tell them me name.”

  Lampy didn’t look particularly like the other aboriginal prisoners to Jack, but he kept his council to himself. It worried him, though. The boy had kept him alive.

  “And you, Irish?” asked Lampy.

  “Call me Jack. I am going to look for my family. I suppose…if I fail to find them, I’ll try to get back to my own country.”

  “You should bring ’em here. Best country in the world,” said Lampy sincerely. “You get to know it, and everything a man could want is out here, my uncle say.”

  He meant it. Despite the fact that they were in a desert, where if you were out in the sun in January it could easily get to a hundred and twenty degrees where man could die of heat, and Lampy was a second-class citizen, or by the sounds of it, worse, in Westralia. “It’s pretty warm,” Jack said.

  “You learn to live with it. The plants and the animals—Hush.” The youngster stiffened like a bird dog catching the scent or sound of prey.

  Which was appropriate, seeing as what he heard was a bird.

  A very big bird, on a nest.

  “We need a boobinch,” said Lampy.

  Jack’s sense of humor was beginning to reassert itself. “Now, I knew I’d be needing one of those! What the devil’s a boobinch?” he asked quietly.

  “We go back to the river,” was the nearest he got to an explanation.

  So they went back to the dry watercourse, and Lampy scavenged among the dry wood debris, coming up with a hollow stick about fourteen inches long and about three inches in diameter. The bottom was blocked with some slightly damp clay that was the only sign that water had been there. Lampy hastily flattened off the top. “You hit like this, see.” He showed Jack how to tap it. It made an odd booming sound. “Now you go there, down that little gully. You hit the boobinch till I tell you to stop.”

  He gave orders well, thought Jack. “What are you going to be doing?”

  “Stealing eggs from the emu. You stop and I get kicked. He thinks you his missus, and he’ll come look.”

  Jack had some idea of the size of the emu, and he knew being kicked by a six-foot-tall flightless bird was no joke. He hoped it wouldn’t be disappointed to find he wasn’t its missus.

  But to his relief it was Lampy rather than the male emu who came along first, with four eggs—big eggs, dark in the moonlight. They walked on, talking about the country, about the wildlife, about the dingoes, and about what had got them
into this situation.

  “I suppose I made some choices. It was either me or Padraig, and I believed that the rebellion would be less hurt by me being in jail than by him,” said Jack. “I hadn’t really thought too much about what it would mean to me…or my family.”

  “Yeah. You can’t really get what being inside means until you’re there,” said the boy.

  Lampy wondered just why he’d started talking. He usually carefully avoided mentioning he could read and write. It only brought you trouble. But when Jack asked he admitted to it. “I been to school. Mission school. We lived next to the mission for a while before ma died. Them nuns!” He shook his head. “They was strict. Were strict. But you can’t talk like they want, or people think you all up yerself.”

  “Heh,” said Jack. “I learned to speak a broad south Irish brogue for that very reason. It was almost like having two languages. One for school, one for playing with the other boys back at my father’s place.”

  Lampy had been slightly surprised to find out that it wasn’t just him who had done this. “True, an’ then you get careless an’ one slips into the other, and you get into trouble. Mind you, some of it goes back around. Even them nuns called me ‘Lampy’ because ma did. Ain’t the name I was given. She just called me that.”

  “Why?”

  Even as he said it, Lampy wondered why he was explaining himself. Maybe because no one had ever asked before. It was private. A last thing between him and his mother. “The nuns taught us this song ‘Give me oil my lamp keep me burning, burning, burning’ and I come home singing it. I was just a little ’un just starting school. Ma loved it. Made me sing it all the time.” He didn’t say: Even when she was dying and I was twelve years old. “She called me her little Lampy, and pretty soon everyone did.”

  “It happens like that.”

  “I stick by it, now she’s dead. It’s kind of respect.”

  “It is,” said Jack. And he seemed to understand. Or at least that’s what Lampy read in it. “How old were you then?”

  “’Bout twelve. Pa went off the rails, well, more than before then. Moved around, nearer to the city on the coast. Me uncle, he came an’ took me away. Back to me mother’s people. I stayed with him, we’d move around, work a bit, go back to the bush a bit. It was good. Did that for two, two and a half years.”

  “Then what happened?” asked Jack.

  Lampy walked silently for a while, then said, “Then he got shot and I went back to my Da.” Which was a very short version of despair, anger, and hurt. “He got him a new woman, but he was drinkin’ real bad. They neither of them was glad to see a half-abo son turn up, but he give me a roof. He was all right until the booze got him. Couldn’t hold a job though, and they was makin’ do…with stealing and selling mostly. I’d learned to be good with sheep, see. So he send me out to get one when there was no food in the house, and they’d eat, sell meat, and be all right for a bit. I just decided I was going to cut out of there, go lookin’ for me cousins…but I fetched them one last sheep. I got back with it…he’d been on the grog and was layin’ into Carol, that tallow-haired woman of his, and she see me come in, and I sing out to him to stop it, I’d brought the mutton. And she runs to me. He comes after her with a stock whip and I tried to take it off him. Only there was an axe and he grabbed that instead. And…and we fought. He was bigger than me, an’ we fell over.”

  They walked in silence for a while. Jack didn’t chase it, just waited for it come out.

  “He got cut, really bad. And she run and got two coppers. I should have run too…but I was trying to stop the blood.” There had been so much blood.

  “The judge said I was a black thief and had killed a white man, see. But I’m under age to hang. So they put me in jail to die.”

  Looked at one way, Jack could see that the boy was a thief and murderer. Looked at another, he was a loyal son who did what his father told him to do, who had then tried to protect his stepmother from his drunken father. The worst part, for Jack, was that Lampy saw himself as the former, at least some of the time, and hated himself for it. And now that he was getting to know the boy, he was also coming to realize that “being inside” was tough on any man, but for Lampy it had been far worse. Jack could see it by the way he touched the land and tasted the air. It must have been like caging an eagle.

  “For what it’s worth, I think you did what any decent man would have done in the situation.”

  Lampy shook his head. “I should have left there, straight off, when I see what he was doing. I knew it wasn’t right.”

  “It’s easy to be wise after the fact. There are plenty of mistakes I wish I hadn’t made. I reckon you paid a high price for them already. Nothing to deserve dying on the railway, in chains.”

  “Never gunna let anyone chain me again.”

  It was already getting hot by the time Clara finally figured out the problem…and that her use of the horn was at least partly to blame. The water supply to feed over the burners was low, and they had, she assumed, some kind of a pressure switch that had levers that choked the fire and stopped it melting the copper pipes.

  The cooling steam fed through a big cooler, and recondensed and fed back into the system. It did have one major escape, as far as she could work out: through the steam whistle.

  Now all she needed was more water, and to get the burners going again, and she would be able to move. And she did have water in a huge tank on the tender…it was just how to get it from one place to the next? But in finding this she also found that she’d used quite a lot of the fuel.

  It took some time to work out that there was a tap, a hand pump, and an indicator just behind her seat in the cab. Obviously the second member of the crew of the scout mole was supposed to see to the water level.

  Now that she had the water situation sorted—and had used rather a lot during the refilling—she merely had to get the burner going. That should have required priming and half an hour…

  It took her a lot more than that, and a fair amount of the primer fuel—some kind of alcohol that made her feel odd, just smelling it in the fire box. She had a horrifying moment when the steam mole started to trundle…and she wasn’t in it. She had to clamber desperately along the frame, burning her hands on the hot pipes, to swing into the cab and pull the levers back. The gauges still read no pressure at all, and really, the steam mole had been going slower than a crawling baby. She could have jumped off and walked to the ladder up to the cab. It was late afternoon before she was ready to start the steam mole moving again. Now, knowing she was lost, knowing that only chance would let her see Tim or Tim see her, she kept the steam mole rumbling along the plain, as she stared out.

  Come full dark, she stopped and smothered the furnace with its damper choke. She had, in her exploring and learning how it all worked, at least learned how to do that. She would have to reprime and get it all going in the morning, but at least that too had no mysteries anymore.

  She ate and drank frugally, spread the bedroll in the cab, and opened the door slightly.

  Sleep was a refuge from all the uncertainty and fear.

  Unfortunately, sleep was a long long way off. She really didn’t know what she should do in the morning. Gnawing at her was the fact that she’d failed. She hadn’t found Tim. There was a chance, maybe, but a chance that she wouldn’t let herself let go of, that he’d found his way back to the power station. But by now she knew that his chances out here were very, very small. It was hard not to feel sorry for herself, and to cry, for him, for her mother, and for the father she was not sure if she could ever reach. Now that she’d seen and been in the desert, it was quite a different concept to somehow rescue her father from a prison somewhere on the other side of it, with no resources but a stolen steam mole, and that probably wouldn’t get that far.

  Tim’s other discovery had been a broken egg shell that led him to climb up to a bird’s nest. It was empty, dashing the hope he’d had of eggs. Then it occurred to him that an empty little egg shell could at l
east make a tiny bowl for the slow drips from the seep in the crack. The egg had lost its big end, and he propped it carefully, positioning it so that the drops—about one every minute, landed in it. It was better than lying on his back with his mouth open waiting, or licking it off the rock, both of which he’d tried. Gradually through the day, he got egg-full after egg-full to drink, as he sat in the shade, dozing, not daring to sleep too long.

  As the heat began to burn off with the sun dropping red onto the horizon, Tim knew he had to move on. He knew he had nothing like enough water, so there was no point in staying there. Of course…the next place could be even worse. Temptation warred within his breast. If he stayed put overnight, he might see the fire again…

  Or he might die of cold. If he’d had a fire or more water he might have tried. He’d tried knocking rocks together to see if he could make a spark, but had no other ideas on how one made fire.

  He had an egg shell full of water, and about fifty of the little figs threaded onto a plait of grass…supplies!

  He started walking down across the still-hot sand with occasional tufts of dead grass and one or two twisted-branched, waxy-leafed trees, so stunted they barely stood much more than shoulder height. And then he heard something. A thumping sound. A regular thumping sound.

  The sound of pistons.

  The red sunset gleamed off the curve of the roof of a scout mole a mile or so away.

  With a yell of joy he started running after it.

  He soon realized he wasn’t gaining on the thing, and that the gathering dark was making his tired, weak half-run even more difficult.

  In the brief twilight Tim staggered toward the steam mole, which trundled steadily along the plain, knowing he could never reach it, but knowing he had to try. He screamed. But he knew, even as he did it, that inside the sealed cab, with its input air running over the coolers and the thump of the steam mole’s pistons, the driver would never hear him.