I was on a mag-lev train, in a turret for a 160 millimeter tank cannon which had been crudely joined to said train. The operator had left for the loo, I thought after drinking too much potato vodka.
And then the intercom crackled.
"Turret Two!" A pause ‘TURRET TWO! Wake up, shoot, we’ve got a beastie on your right."
I paused, and with a sinking feeling looked down at my control board.
A big black "2" confirmed my fears.
So, I stuck my head out the under hatch, and heard snores. A quick peek, and the turret operator was sleeping off his good vodka on a train bench. The sweet sound of his snores let me know that waking wasn’t going to happen any time soon.
So, I studied the controls. They were simple and straightforward, although the shoot button was on the left side. Good Russian engineering–geniuses designing weapons for idiots. They built their weapons to be tough, cheap, and to make it so even a clueless peasant could not mangle up the job.
I spun the turret to my right, with a bit of an overspin, and then corrected. Only trees filled my periscope, and I wondered how I would ever find the beastie in that.
"Two, you moron. Your other right." The exzaggerated patience was in Russian, of course, but I’ve known that language for at least two hundred years, so I was good.
I spun the gun turret with a whine, and a grate to my left. A field of clear snow was being disturbed by a large, muscled, but still gangly figure with some coat of netting or something on it. It looked big. I lined it up, but then paused.
How did I know it deserved to die? The only person I’d met so far had been a drunken Russian gun operator. For all I knew that could be an American commando in a ghillie suit out there ….trying to board the train…which was going over a hundred miles per hour.
I looked back. The creature was gaining on us. So I fired to miss. Still, it dodged. I’m not sure how since I fired a shell that went several times the speed of sound.
It bounced to its feet, and came back at the train with even greater speed. Suddenly, I closed in on the face. That face did not look human. It looked bestial with carnivorous teeth, and a tongue flappng in the breeze, and an overcoat of long fur.
So I centered my shot, and took it. This time, its dodge was slower, and my shell landed close enough to see it cartwheel across the sky. As the train sped away, I saw it rise to its feet, and shake its fist at me. But clearly it could not pursue.
And then I sat there for a second trying to piece things together which was a mistake. A minute later, I heard a rapping on the metal hatch door in my floor.
"Open up. Now. Come out with hands empty, or we toss in grenade."
Oops. In the two minutes I’d been thinking, they had gone to check on why their man was acting weird, and seen him asleep, and realized they did not know who was up there.
I considered my options while some more yelling went on.
Finally, I opened up the hatch, and let them drag me out, and dump me on the hard floor like a sack of gravel. Three soldiers stood about me, too close, and I judged I could if need be, take them despite their veterans’s eyes.
"Come. You will see Captain. Maybe he let me toss you off train. Bounce many times." The man with several gold stars on his collar said this.
Great.
We walked up the train, for five more cars, and then entered a warmer, and pleasantly decorated train car. Here a huge silver samovar puffed out steam and the scent of black tea, and over there a giant map of Eurasia competed for my interest with a map of a train loop.
"Sardic." I noted one of the names on it.
"Left there five days ago. Now who are you?" The Captain of the train had four gold stars on his collar. He was a short man with thinning brown hair that looked like it was regularly pulled at in frustration.
His smile had some slight warmth, and humor to it which was more than I deserved.
"Ah, well, you can call me Tadeusz, and as to who I am, that would be hard to explain. Could you fill me in on…" I waved a hand at the map of Eurasia with its unfamiliar political designations.
"Why don’t you know that?" He said with cutting insight. Ah, me. I shrugged in my head. It probably wouldn’t hurt if I told him something of myself.
"Imagine me as an amnesia victim with some strange tools, who just dropped in. I don’t mean you any harm." Not yet, anyways. I was still loyal to America, after all. It remained to be seen what this world’s politics were like. Of course, I’d been to one world where America had been unsettled, and Germany and Russia had been on the fifteenth year of World War Two, and it had been fought with zombies. My life is weird I know.
"Ah. Verser. Scriff." He shot these two words out, and even my centuries of experience did not keep the tell-tale surprise off my face. He laughed.
"Let him go." After I was released, the Captain waved me to an overstuffed couch which I would be hard put to jump out of anyways.
"Well Tadeusz Verser Man, you’re no doubt wondering where, and when you are."
"And how you know." I asked leaning forward.
"You’re in Siberia, aboard the Mary Pipov Express, a nuclear fuelled mag-lev. We serve the Secret Cities Route. Secret Cities are the places where the old Commuist government went about developing research in very high security. Now that the Soviet of all the Russias has collapsed after the Spasm War into the Greater Russian Empire, we’re pretty much ignored out here."
"How ignored?" I asked sensing something below the surface. The XO’s snort of disdain, and the looks of despair among the troopers answered my question.
"One of the Secret Cities dealt with Scriff. Now my degrees are in Fission, and Xenobiology, but still this is fascinating stuff. Thing is, they kept having people vanish. Now, they wondered, and so they checked around. Another SC, in violation of protocol told them they’d been having anonomalous gravity readings. Planet Earth was getting lighter in chunks of 60-100 kilograms at a time. A quick comparison, and it was verified. Somehow the scriff made people leave Earth. More studies were planned, but then Vladimir arrived at the Secret City. He talked of nonsense, about a Second World War being fought with Zombies and Trolls. And he mentioned the name of a guy who had made him a verser–Tadeusz. But when after a lot of effort, he got a squished flat insect to integrate, and walk about for our cameras, well, that was a bombshell. After that, we believed him. Unfortunately, the effort was so hard that he ‘versed out’."
"It might have been a botch." I murmured. Because I didn’t think you could reanimate the dead in this world. But sometimes freaky things happen where the rules get tossed out the window. Usually, you don’t survive the experience, but I have to admit one of my fondest memories was seeing a young student try to summon a wind elemental, and instead cause a rain of blue-tinted candy popcorn to cover the entire UCLA campus. That took some quick explaining by the local secret magic guilds, and they took away my license as a teacher for a year after that, too. But that was a world where the fey and the magi and the spirits of nature hid in a world supposedly ruled by Technology. That was not this world, and so I needed to focus, and get my head back into the game.
"I believe I know him. Let me ask you another question, what did I shoot at?"
"There’s another city that was making an ape-wolf supercommando. They escaped and rampaged. Now they breed in the hills, and eat well anything, even each other." The XO said bleakly.
"Why doesn’t the central government…?"
"They have concerns closer to home." The Captain said.
"All right. Then we organize a hunter group. It will be hard. Have to build some very strong, but small forts, but it can be done."
The Captain shook his head.
"No, nyet. I mean, you’re right. But if we do that, we would embarrass the central government. After all, we’re not really supposed to be working this line. They would call it ‘vigilante action’ or ‘plotting a rebellion’ and cut our lines, and squash us."
"But then, what are you supposed to do?" I asked perplexed.
"Do?" One of the soldiers laughed blackly. "Why, we’re supposed to die quietly so as to not cause a disturbance in the sleep of our betters."
I looked about, and saw the same hopeless look of men doomed to die for stupid reasons. It reminded me of my home where the sometimes police would rather you died, then did something so uncouth as to defend yourself with a gun, and thus make them look bad. They would come down ten times harder on any perceived vigilantism than the crack house with the automatic weapons in plain view that had driven the homeowner to desperation.
"That so, Captain?"
"Da. We keep running. Buying perhaps another year, maybe two. The Chinese raid us. The monsters eat. Russian bueraucrats come to demand favors we can ill afford to ‘forestall shutting us down’ and dooming all the Secret Cities to death in the cold since our Emerald nuclear fuel is the only thing that keeps them going. And me, I keep hoping that the horse will learn to sing."
"Ah." I said. I couldn’t sing well, but I had more than a few tricks up my sleeves, and if it came to that…I’d killed Stalin in one timeline, and Mao Tse-Tung in another.
