The crew of the Mary Pipov Siberian Express magnetic-levitation trained raced through the howling wilderness with me for several hours after my interview with the Captain of the fission powered train.  But then I heard a strange note in the shrilling vibration, and turned to the men next to me.  They were already suiting up even as snow streamed past the windows.

So, I reached into my duffel bag for my extreme cold weather gear.  Still, I was unprepared for the blast of subzero air that hit my face through the mohair scarf, the Khan of All the Russias had given me.

"How?" I started to ask the shapeless mass next to me as we clambered down to the ground in the outer unheated airlock chamber.

As if he expected the question, he laughed through his respirator.

"Fifty, sixty, below Fahrenheit. Go back inside."

I refused, considering myself justly, I thought, more capable than the others. After all, I’m a four hundred year old verser who has been in more dangerous situations than I can recall. But, I did turn up my internal thermostat, effectively giving myself an artificial fever.  Still, I was shivering before I took three steps as the wind hit me.

For, you see, it was sixty below in the staircase, sheltered from the forty mile per hour wind.  Outside the windbreak, it was much worse.

I reached inside me, determined to not let a little wind overcome me, and suddenly felt and saw and smelled blind sparks race across my eyes.  I wanted to scream from pain and from frustration as the brain burn splashed through my head.  I was able to limit its damage by quickly erected mental walls, but still I crumpled to the ground.

They hustled me back inside as I ‘digitized’ the pain information in my head, and was thus able to clear my mind. Now it registered in my consciousness as a number, instead of as pain.  But, I accepted that I was not going out this time which they told me with much shaking of their fingers.

"Heroes get dead. We need live workers." One mass of cold-resistant polar wear muttered to me as he went back out.  Later, the doctor came by, and checked me out.  He cleared me, but insisted on me having heavier outerwear, which they would try to get for me in New Tempest.

Knowing they were right, but aggravated about it, I turned to prayer to reorder my spirit.  My pride in my toughness, and my wanting to seem capable had committed me to foolhardy behaviour.  I knew this was a world with some psi, but not a whole lot.  And I knew that I could not carry everything I needed for every possible weather condition on my back.  Scrounging in the local environment is a neccessity for a verser.

After all, I could carry all the cold weather gear I needed, but then find my next world was a tropical rain forrest in its pleasant parts, and hotter in its other parts.  Feeling more reasonable, and relaxed after my impromptu prayer time, I got up, and set about finding other work.

The smell of the kitchen drew me, and I found myself drafted to prepare plates for the returning and very cold workers.  It was a good time for I have always enjoyed work in the kitchen, and the preparation of food.  Pickle soup, borscht soup, and deer stroganoff unless I missed my guess were supplemented by barrel fulls of sugar-laden black tea served at temperatures which made it hazardous to anything but the sturdy mugs we used.

The once fancy dining room converted long ago to cafeteria use was crowded with laughing men who exulted in their victory over the cold, and the broken line as the kitchen crew served them, and the First Mate who had threatened to watch me bounce as he threw me from the moving train came by to check on everyone as did the Doctor.

Over the next day, we stopped twice more, and by the time we got to New Tempest we had stopped eighteen times.  Seven broken lines, four snow blocked passages, one stop to add more snow to the coolant tanks of the fission reactor, two times to shoot deer for the stewpot, and three times because the magnets under the train were beginning to improperly balance us and we were beginning to oscillate back and forth preparatory to leaving the lines altogether.

In that time, I healed of my brain burn, and cautiously experimented with psionic powers.  If I was careful, I could do some of my telekinesis, even up to manipulating bubbles of solid water, but it was like the universe was resisting me, even though it let me do this.

New Tempest was a rough-hewn military base converted to add a very tiny Science City just before the S[asm War.  Now its troops were stranded, and although officially they answered to Moscow, in reality, they worked for the Captain of the Mary Pipov.

We traded Emerald nuclear fuel for a new magnet which was part of their work at the Science City.  They studied all sorts of odd electromagnetic effects–hence Tempest.  We also picked up some mushrooms, and some outerwear for me.

The next day at dawn, we left for the Rough Passage which the Major in charge of New Tempest had warned about.  It seemed that Han raiders were especially prevalent this run, and he had not been able to chase them out even though he personally had led four patrols out on snow shoes to do just that.

So, it was with round the clock watches that we raced into the Rough Passage.  Temperatures plunged so that the heaters were turned fully up, and still we wore undershirt, shirt, sweater, and open jacket as we worked with one eye open to the forrests and canyon walls flashing past us.

I asked the Enviromental Tech Johansen Ivan why it was so cold.  He laughed and set down his potato vodka.

"Oh, you’ll love this one. Back near twenty years ago, there was a Science City here.  Tapped geothermal power in the Earth’s crust to run a Tesla scalar machine."

I blinked.  That was very advanced, and very dangerous.  Playing around with large size scalar machines is much more dangerous than nuclear weapons.  

"Well, they decided to engage in a little Weatherwar against the Main Enemy as they called the Americans in those days.  No one knows what happened, but I think the Americans hacked their system, and turned it against them.  BOOM, and I mean BOOM!!  They ran up enough energy to create a stable supercell from the upper atmosphere.  Of course, this fractured the earth’s crust a bit in the area, and the whole town sank into the permafrost.  Now, it rarely gets above a hundred below in the Rough Passage."

I blinked again, and then an obvious question occurred to me.

"How do the Han survive out…"

"Genetic engineering.  We’ve captured Han raiders, they look closer to short, and really hairy polar bears than to men."

"Thats, thats…."

"Insane, I know."

Evil, I had been tempted to say, but I like to be sure before I condemn someone.  Perhaps the Han leadership had a good reason why it warped men into something more like an animal…but somehow I doubted it.  I expected they used their men, the same way a civilized country would use its hammers.  Devices to beat down on a problem with, and if they broke, go get another one from the hardware store, or in this case the genelab.

It was twelve hours later, in the midst of the Passage that the Han attacked.  Suddenly there were thumps on the roof, and then dents, and then sparks flew as the Han on the roof tried to slice through the heavy gauge steel alloy with their power tools.

One man hit the ‘pulse’ button, and an electrical charge flashed through the metal of the car.  There were less thumps a moment later, although I did see several large shapes fly by the windows and crash into the ground or the tree trunks at well over a hundred miles per hour.  Still there were more thumps on the roof, and all waited since no one carried a weapon heavy enough to punch through the roof, kill a polar bear, and do it without nasty richochets probably killing us.

Instead, it became clear the plan was to wait for them to enter, and then massed fire with the prayer that richochets in the cabin would be managed properly with aimed fire.  And all this before five hundred pounds of drugged up polar bear bit their heads off.

This was stupid.

I went forward to go to the next car where my duffel bag sat with its plasma cannon which would make short work of a polar bear/man even if he had an inch of steel to hide behind.  It could melt a main battle tank set on high.  A polar bear would be no trouble.

And then the roof plate fell open toward the Envirotech, and he gaped in terror as claws came toward his face.  I leapt flat-footed fifteen feet and slammed into the raider.  We tumbled into the seats, and it tried to rip at me.  Panic filled me as I tried to restrain it.

It was strong, possibly as strong as I was with my cyberwear, and worse, it had four clawed appendages and I had only two with my short titanium extruding fingernails.  It started to rip at me, and I saw it was fearless from either drugs or a combat high.

And then I remembered, and felt inside myself.  Laughter bubbled up in my throat, and my teeth bared in a rictus grin as I let it slash me across my chest.

It felt good.

And then the berserkergang took me fully.  With a scream, I dove into the polar bear, my hands plunging for its vitals even as my pitiful human teeth grabbed its sensitive nose and clamped down with cyber-enhanced strength to the point where I heard cracking noises in my head.

But I didn’t care.

Hack, slash, maim, and rend was my universe, and it became his as well.  We fought to the death with me laughing madly in sheer joy at the sprays of blood raining onto the walls of the train car.  And then with a feeling of dissapointment, I saw him slump, and die.

I turned to see if there were any other, but only one other bear was in the room, and it lay pierced with many holes.  One of my crew, (crew what was that?) was tending a bullet stung arm.  I howled in frustration to see no more that needed killing, and they stared at me iin fear.

So I stepped out of the carcass of the man I had killed, and strode like a conquering king while they darted back from my path.  But no other cars needed my help, at least not of the next two, and when I saw myself in a mirror I was covered from head to just the few hairs on top of my head with blood and bits.  The fiery certainty, the mocking laughter seemed to flee out of me, like an Ebola victim bleeding out, and I fell to the ground as one senseless.

I woke the next day, weak as a kitten, and dressed in new clothes, and washed.  The Doctor was looking at me concerned as was the Captain.

"Tadeusz, we appreciate what you’ve done, but in your way, you’re more scary than the Han." The Captain said softly, reluctantly.

"I am more dangerous than them, tis true.  But isn’t that what you want, what you need?"  The words came out, even though in my reduced state all I wanted to do was turn over and go back to sleep.

"But, well…"

"The problem is you fear me losing control. I give you my pledge Captain. I shall not berserk again without your permission while I remain on this train.

The Captain paused, and then nodded.  He smiled softly at me.

"Thank you. You know, you saved at least two of my crews lives with what you did.  Possibly all of them in that cabin."

I nodded.  It was true. Once that mass of fury got to claw range, there was little a normal man could do against him without great courage or desperation and a good knife.  And even then, that would likely not be enough.

"How did…"

"It had a frictionfree cutter.  It dissasociates molecules.  Very stealthy, and expensive.  The Han are upping the ante.  And for your other question, the Han get on the train by use of catapults in the trees."

"But that means that more of them that fly miss the train than hit the train, and probably die.  In fact, many that hit probably die from impact…."

"They are drugged to the gills."  The Doctor interrupted.

"Yes, Tadeusz, probably as many as seventy raiders died last night, even though only five got inside the train.  We lost no one ourselves, although we have four out with serious injuries.  In ways, I’d like to surrender to the Han, but they won’t allow it."

The Captain stared at me, answering my next question even before I formed it.

"How do you…?"

"I’m a chess grandmaster.  I see ahead usually about nine moves."  He smiled, and I drifted back to sleep feeling hopeless for if a chess grandmaster could not see a way out of the trap, then how was I supposed to?

The Mary Pipov slowly decayed, and the raiders kept coming, and without her the Science Cities dotting the putatively Russian Siberia (actually an anarchic no-mans-land) would freeze in the dark without her Emerald nuclear fuel.  I did not know what to do, and so I referred the problem to the Most High, and fell deeper into sleep.

And so it was that I slept through the rest of the Rough Passage as I recovered from the drain of the berserkergang.

I and the others went on land in the Science City of New Haven which hosted elk herders and their herds, and duels with laser pistols or just plain knife fights at all hours of the day and night.  But, no one bothered me or the crew.  Being a crew member of the Pipov brought you status, and everyone knew you were part of the essential supply line that kept the city lit.  Besides, having killed a ‘polar bear’ with my ‘bare hands’, no one was particularly eager to tangle with me.

Two days there, and we set out with freezer car loads full of fresh elk meat, and we headed out across the permafrost of the Lesser Syndic Valley.  It was a valley by courtesy only as it had a one foot in a mile slope for over two hundred miles of terriffic sameness.

However, here, I learned how to fix the line when it broke.  Electricity flows down the line from the reactor car, and this holds us up.  But sometimes the line breaks due to temperature rises which cause the ground to move.  Most of the time, the line is flexible enough to take this, but especially if such a shift occurs between the temps of negative thirty and thirty-five then it will be decent odds that a break occurs.

I got out in the knee-high snow with the bitterly cold air, and the crystalline dry air.  Plomphing through the powdery stuff, I came to the front of the rail.  Ten feet further, and I could see the further line swaying to the left (or what these people for no reason I could figure called the ’right’) with a two feet gap between the lines.

I started to hammer the lines back into place as the others offered, and a vibration set up, and began to oppose me.  I tried to vary it, but that seemed to do little.  And suddenly a vibration came when I was sending.  It spun the hammer from my hand, and one of the others snatched it from the air.

"This line, this alloy, she has her ways."  And so that one began to hammer.  Softer than I had done it, and with a 3-2-1, and 3-2-1 with a long pause and begin again rhythmn.  I was able to match it, and felt in my hand, the various vibrations in the mag-lev line balancing each other out.

From there, we fit in a short joiner piece.  And then they started hammering, but it seemed now they were trying to create kickback, and that they enjoyed having their hammers flung from their hands.

"Help." One panted to me.

"How?"  I asked, and he begin to explain.  The trick was to try to get a very strong vibration heading toward the joined ends of the line which would then merge the lines together like dough squashed together with fingers.  First though, it had to be pushed to the right freqency.

So, I began, and they laughed.  I’ve learned some rhythmn over the centuries, but its not my ‘thing’, and so this came hard to me.  I tapped my ‘In the Groove’ psionic skill to make it easier.  But still for a long time it evaded me, both on this trip, and on the one next year.

Finally, we went inside, the line fixed, and all was cheer, but me in my gloom.  I turned to deeper study of that rhythmn, and so later that day I was able to genuinely help fix another break.

In the distance, I saw the Emerald Mountains which is where we get the Uranium Ore for the Mary Pipov’s nuclear reactor.  The thing is, I heard some of the people were hideous mutants, deformed by the radiation.

Some of the crew expected this to yield superhumans, but I laughed.  Genetic load and degeneration were proven realities while mutations creating actual new qualities, and new information into the universe from random chance, well, I had never seen proof of it.

And it was with these thoughts in mind that the train, its crew, and I climbed deeper into the winding circles of of the Emerald Mountains.  The train circled mountains, and all the while, I kept my own private watch for superhuman mutant cannibals with glowing eyeballs.