Graveyard of Empires

by Lincoln Cole

  But he still didn’t have time to rest. He slowly brought the train up to speed, peering forward and watching the tracks ahead. The lights didn’t go very far, and he couldn’t see more than a few dozen meters.

  “It’s no wonder the engineer couldn’t see me,” he muttered.

  A few minutes passed. He watched the tracks, but every few seconds he felt his eyes slip closed. They simply did not want to stay open. He felt miserably exhausted, past the point of caring where he fell asleep. All his mind cared about was that it could shut down.

  “No,” he muttered. “Can’t fall asleep.”

  He fought for another minute or two, determined to stay awake until the train reached the Academy.

  Naturally, he fell asleep mid-thought.

  6

  Jayson awoke with a start, disoriented and afraid. It was painfully cold and he was leaning sideways against a metal frame, almost lying flat. The world was tilted…or something…but he couldn’t quite tell why. Whatever had happened was in his semi-conscious memory. All he knew was that something felt wrong, but he couldn’t tell what it was.

  A second later he could.

  The left wheels of the engine thudded back down on the rails as the train flew around a turn. The motion jolted him to full awareness, almost throwing him out of the engineer’s chair, and he cursed in fear and frustration.

  It was light out, early morning, and the train was thundering down the tracks. What had seemed slow in the trees was now dangerously fast on the curves. They were up the mountain on switchbacks. A light snow had begun to fall, and the landscape was drastically different from where they’d just left.

  Tight switchbacks, Jayson remembered suddenly, and getting tighter. They’d slowed down a lot before reaching this point on his first trip up the mountain. It was sheer luck, he realized, that the train hadn’t capsized during that last turn.

  He fought down rising panic, wracked his brain, and remembered the control scheme of the dashboard. He skimmed it over, picked a lever at random, and yanked back on it. The engine started shuddering on the rails, but they didn’t slow down.

  “Damn it,” he said, glancing around. He quickly pushed that one back into position and picked another one. They were coming up to the next switchback, and this was far worse than the last one. They would capsize if they reached it at this speed.

  He grabbed hold of the next lever and yanked it back. There was a loud screeching sound as the brakes engaged.

  The train slowed to a crawl. They edged up to the next turn at a fraction of the pace. The next curve they passed went much smoother. The wheels stayed firmly on the tracks.

  Jayson breathed a sigh of relief. He set the speed on the lowest setting and relaxed back into the chair, rubbing his hands and blowing on them. It was cold now, a lot colder than it had been the first time they rode up to the Academy, and he wondered how cold it got later in the season.

  It took only a minute to realize he needed something to cover up with: a coat or blanket. He climbed out of the engine, dropped to the ground, and waited for the passenger car to catch up.

  At the slow speed, it was easy to keep pace. He walked up, pulled the door open, and slipped inside the car.

  Not a lot had changed. Tricia was still sitting on the floor with Richard’s head in her lap. She had stopped crying and was idly twirling his curly hair. She looked exhausted and hurt, eyes haunted.

  The other woman, the one he’d tied up, was still in her seat. Though now she also had a bag over her head. Jayson looked at it curiously and then at Tricia.

  Tricia shrugged in reply. “I’m not sure if the bag helps,” she said, “but it can’t hurt.”

  “I see,” he said.

  Jayson went over to the med kit and dug inside. He checked over Tricia’s previous head injury. It looked pretty well healed from their time spent in the forest, so he checked his own leg. The wound was scabbed over and rough, so he spent a few minutes cleaning it and re-bandaging it. Then he popped some painkillers.

  The numb feeling spread through his body in only seconds. It was like heaven.

  She shivered. “It got cold.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jayson said sleepily. “I wonder if there are any blankets in here.”

  “There aren’t. I checked.”

  Jayson nodded. Then he hesitated before asking, “What happened, Tricia? Why are you…?”

  She was silent for a long second, then she shivered again. This time, it had nothing to do with the weather. “She was in my mind.”

  “What?”

  “She was in my mind,” she repeated.

  Jayson shook his head. “I don’t understand. What do you mean ‘in your mind’?”

  “I mean she was inside my goddamned mind,” Tricia said angrily, tears streaking down her cheeks. The emotion was sudden, startling Jayson. “Controlling me. I wanted to move but she wouldn’t let me. I could feel her in there, playing around like I was some toy, but I could only watch as she…”

  Jayson sat on the floor next to her. He reached out and put a hand on her arm. “That seems…”

  “Impossible,” Tricia finished, grabbing his hand and squeezing. “But it’s true.”

  “She’s one of them,” a voice said groggily. A gun appeared in Tricia’s hand from nowhere, aiming at the engineer as he woke up.

  Her hand was shaking.

  “Easy,” Jayson said, gently taking the gun, “it’s the engineer. And he’s tied up.”

  Tricia let out a deep breath and relaxed. “Sorry, I’m just…”

  “It’s okay,” he said. He turned to the engineer. In better lighting Jayson saw that he was a plain looking little man, balding and fat. His face was very round and his eyes too close together.

  Right now he was staring intently at the woman with a bag on her head, fear evident in his eyes.

  “What do you mean?” Jayson asked. “What do you mean she’s one of them?”

  “What she did to your friend, she did to me too,” the man said quietly. “You should kill her, now, while you have the chance.”

  “You mean she controlled your mind?”

  The man winced and nodded. “Just for the fun of it, I think. But her sister is worse. Way worse.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Jayson said. “What you’re talking about just isn’t possible.”

  “I thought the same thing until about a year ago. Then that bitch Maven showed up. And she…she killed…”

  Jayson had heard the name before. She was all over the news, one of the twin sisters that came with Darius Gray when he rebelled. She was on his new Council, one of his Generals. Together, the newscasters proclaimed, they would help build a new world with fairness for all.

  Darius was at the head of the new Union.

  So, this must be…

  “Shit,” Jayson said, dropping his face into his hands. “You mean the sisters? This is one of them?”

  “’Devils’ is more appropriate,” the engineer said with a shudder. He glanced over at Jayson. “They serve Darius. They have…powers. Alyssa can control minds. And Maven…Maven used her mind to grab me and squeeze.”

  “Squeeze?”

  “Imagine being caught in a vice grip that’s slowly tightening.”

  “Telekinesis?”

  The man shrugged. “Call it what you want. I call it scary.”

  “Is Maven here?”

  “No, Thank God. Alyssa is bad. Cruel. The other one, she’s crazy.”

  “A crazy woman with special powers,” Jayson said skeptically. “Forgive me if I have trouble believing you.”

  The engineer nodded grimly at Tricia. “Just look at your friend.”

  Jayson was still skeptical, but he had to admit it made a sort of logical sense. Tricia was rock solid in her demeanor, but she clearly believed that such a thing happened. Jayson didn’t want to believe, but mostly because if he admitted something like that was possible…

  “Does the Ministry know?” he asked.


  “They’d have to,” the man said with a sharp nod. “But here’s the scarier question: did the Ministry do this to them?”

  Jayson wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.

  7

  “When I moved here, the Silvent Academy had thirty trainers,” the engineer explained a while later. Jayson was sitting in one of the seats watching the snow fall. It wasn’t clinging to the ground yet, so it was still early in the season. “And about two hundred students. They were the Hammers. Greatest soldiers you would ever see. I was proud to work here.”

  “I’ve heard the Hammers were genetically engineered,” Jayson said.

  The man shrugged. “Could be possible, sure.”

  “Genetic engineering is illegal.”

  “So is murder. It’s unethical, and we can leave it at that. I won’t make judgments one way or the other. I will say that these men and women were huge. Especially in those suits of armor. Looked like something out of a movie. Outside the suits, they were like normal men. Inside…”

  “They were trained here?” Jayson asked. “But not anymore?”

  “Their training facilities were moved to the Core. Closer to Axis. That was twenty-some years ago. After that, things out here died out. People left, the city fell apart. A few stayed on. Alexander Robertson was headmaster. He bought the land for pennies and kept the place open, but there weren’t any students. I stayed on because I’ve got nowhere else to go.

  “Then about a year ago Maven showed up. Alexander told me she was scarred as a little girl. The Ministry threw acid in her face to punish her for disobeying. Nearly killed her.”

  “That’s horrible,” Tricia muttered.

  “If you met her,” said the engineer, “you’d wish they finished the job.”

  “So she came to the Academy?”

  The engineer nodded. “On behalf of Darius Gray. Said she wanted the place reopened. We said there were no students, so she told us she’d find some. Send them here. Alexander would train them and Darius would pay. It would be just like when he trained the Hammers.”

  “By dumping them into the middle of the forest?”

  The man chuckled sardonically. “Hell no. I think Robertson figured out that he’d signed a deal with the devil shortly after. Maven told him how he would modify the training. This was all Maven’s plan. She insisted on it. Said any training should be like the real thing. If all of you died, she’d just get a new batch of students. Sink or swim.”

  “If they don’t teach us anything then it’s not really training,” Jayson said.

  “Didn’t I tell you she was crazy?” the engineer asked. “I don’t know what the Ministry did to that little girl, but she’s turned into a terrifying young woman.” He glanced out the window, furrowing his brows. “We’re about to the Academy. Who’s up front?”

  “No one,” Jayson said. “It’s cold as hell out there.”

  “Well, you’re going to want to get up there soon. The tracks end after the Academy, and we’ll end up in a pond if we don’t get stopped in time. Make sure to throttle down to four before making the final turn and check the ELM gauge to make sure—”

  “You do it,” Jayson said, standing up and walking over. He cut the tape on the engineer’s wrists. The short man rubbed them gratefully. “You aren’t going to screw us, right?”

  “Not a chance,” the man said. Then he hesitated. “But I will give you a heads up: she’s important. Like, major big league. And I’m pretty sure you pissed her off.”

  Jayson exchanged a glance with Tricia. “Do you think we should turn around? Head to the city instead?” he asked.

  The engineer laughed. “Trust me, your best bet is to hold your head high and pretend you did nothing wrong. She isn’t dead, just a little bruised. And you hit her in the head. If you get really lucky she won’t even remember what happened.”

  “Encouraging,” Jayson mumbled.

  The engineer slid it open. A cool rush of air flowed inside along with swirling flecks of snow. The man paused. “Whatever you do now, though,” he said, “don’t take that bag off her head.”

  Then he jumped out and ran toward the front engine. Jayson slid the door shut behind him. He leaned against the door and let out a long sigh.

  “This,” he said to Tricia as he sat back down, “is turning out to be the worst two weeks of my life.”

  Chapter 24

  Sector 6 – Jaril

  Maven Ophidian, Jayson Coley

  1

  Maven sat in front of the terminal aboard the warship Eisle, stunned by the report she was receiving and trying really hard not to laugh.

  “They did what?”

  “They kidnapped the train,” Alexander Robertson explained on the other end of the connection. His voice was terse, expression worried. He thinks I’m going to be angry, she realized. He doesn’t realize this is the greatest news ever. “And they captured your sister, who was the only passenger on board. We arrested them, of course.”

  “What, why?”

  The man’s expression quickly became guarded. “Technically, they failed the test you set out for them. They did not arrive back at the Academy of their own—”

  “Wait, wait, I want to hear more about my sister again,” Maven said. “So they hit her in the back of the head, tied her up, and turned her over to you?”

  Alexander looked uncomfortable. “She did not tell us she was coming in advance of her visit or we would have warned her of your test.”

  “Oh, I warned her,” Maven said.

  “The engineer said that when she showed up in town she was quite persuasive and unwilling to listen to suggestions.”

  Maven finally broke down, laughing and clapping her hands. “That is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard. Oh, my sister must be furious.”

  “She has not awoken yet,” the old man said, running a hand over his gray beard. “Shall I notify you when she does?”

  “No, no,” Maven said. “Just stick her back on the train and send her home. Drug her if you’re worried she’ll wake up early. I’ll deliver a report to Darius that her mission was a complete success.”

  “What shall I do with the, uh, students?” Alexander asked. “The ones who failed the test.”

  “How many made it back?”

  “Five,” Alexander replied. “The others perished in the wilderness. But the three that arrived by train technically did not abide the rules you set forth—”

  “A non-issue,” Maven said, waving her hand in dismissal. “I consider kidnapping Alyssa to be a complete success!”

  “Very well,” Alexander said. “We will begin training immediately.”

  Maven clapped her hands again, excited. “I look forward to future reports.”

  They disconnected the call, and Maven burst out laughing. She fell out of her chair and collapsed to the floor she was laughing so hard. She couldn’t shake the image of Alyssa tied up in the back of the train with a bag over her head. How that must have infuriated her pompous ass-kissing sister.

  She couldn’t wait to speak to her about it. At length. Many times. Alyssa would want to have the students killed, of course, but Maven knew it would not be a hard sell to convince the Council otherwise. After all, the students had effectively dealt with Alyssa even when they were wholly unprepared for her mental abilities.

  How useful would they be with adequate training?

  2

  Jayson was asleep within ten minutes of the train stopping.

  Alexander Robertson met them outside. If he was surprised to see the train rolling to a stop in front of his Academy, he didn’t show it. The three bedraggled passengers stumbled out into the cold wind and snow flurries.

  Richard was immediately shuffled off to the infirmary, and Tricia went with him. That left Jayson alone with Alexander.

  Jayson told him what had happened over the last few weeks, as well as whom their prisoner was. Robertson didn’t say a single word during the entire explanation. When Jayson finished, Alexander nodded in
response, led Jayson to a nondescript room on the second floor of the Academy, and disappeared. Then he locked the door behind him.

  The room was plain and gray. The bed was hard. He’d never been so content.

  He awoke at some point later. His body ached, and he was exhausted. He tried to remember what woke him up and decided it must have been someone knocking. He stumbled to his feet and shuffled to the door, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and containing a yawn.

  It opened a second later, and he saw Robertson waiting for him. The old man looked tired, especially around the eyes. He was leaning on his cane in a white suit with his gray hair combed backward.

  “Hello, Jayson,” he said.

  “Hello,” Jayson replied with a nod. “Is this my prison cell?”

  “It was.”

  Jayson pondered that for a second. “That could be interpreted in quite a few different ways. Several of which are not positive. Are you planning to execute me, Alexander?”

  “Headmaster,” Robertson corrected without malice. “And no. You are now one of my students.”

  “What if I’m not interested?”

  Alexander Robertson didn’t reply. Jayson hadn’t really expected him to.

  “What happens next?”

  “Training. Survival. Our benefactor is expecting you to be useful within a year and fully trained within three.”

  Jayson bowed his head. “Useful,” he said, shaking his head. “As a Hammer? Or whatever Darius’s equivalent will be?”

  “Not exactly,” Robertson replied. “The Hammers were trained to be paragons of humanity, to be better, stronger, and more resilient than any enemy they might face.”

  “Oh?” Jayson said. “Then what are we being trained for?”

  Alexander Robertson smiled, but it was a sad smile. “Get some sleep Jayson,” he said, turning away from the room. “You’ll need it. We will begin tomorrow, and once we start, we won’t stop until you are done or dead.”

  “You didn’t answer me,” Jayson said, grabbing his arm as he turned to leave. “What does she expect us to be? Spies? Assassins? Soldiers?”

  The headmaster let out a long sigh, closing his eyes. When he opened them again, Jayson saw defeat in his eyes. When he spoke, the word was almost too low to make out.