Ten Minutes to North Point
A story in the Era of Silence
by F. Dan O’Neill
A flashtrack speeding through the wasteland.
Three hundred tons of magic-hardened steel screamed down the tracks into the station’s waiting arms. A ripple of energy slid through the air, caught the train like a glove, and scarred its chrome flanks with laser-straight scorch marks. Momentum fought against the resonant brakes--a heartbeat, two. Then, with a last half-screech half-sigh, the train shuddered to a halt.
“It can’t be done,” said Royce Bell.
Nata’Gan stirred her drink with the hilt of a plastic fork. They were in a small station café, separated from the platform by a thin pane of glass that did nothing to dampen the noise of the waiting crowd. A Primas-ika busker, scales edged with purple chrome in the mid-city style, leaned against the wall outside and strummed a lyre.
“Why not?” Nata took a sip.
“Million reasons.” Royce counted on his fingers. “Start with time. The train’s only moving for what, fifteen minutes?”
“Ten.”
“Ten minutes. And in that time, it covers a hundred and fifty clicks. Before, New Bekton low-city station: crawling with guards. After, North Point station: crawling with guards. Not enough time for a robbery.”
“That’s under normal operations,” Nata answered. “We can disrupt things.”
Royce sighed. “No, we can’t. The flashtrack doesn’t stop, short of a crash. You planning to kill two hundred people?”
“I’d prefer to keep the casualties in the single digits.” Nata’Gan’s eyes were all pupil, violet orbs that seemed sometimes to grow darker or lighter depending on her mood. There were some humans who couldn’t look an elek in the eye for long. Found it unnerving.
Royce had gotten over that years ago.
“Right.” He scratched the back of his head. “What’s more, you can’t get on or off while it’s moving. That sheathe of magic around the cars sublimates anything it touches: flesh, metal…”
“Null-spores?” Nata interjected.
Royce raised an eyebrow. “You want to gamble on it?”
“Fine. We can’t stop the train; we can’t dump the cargo. So we make a switch.”
“En route?”
“Why not?” Nata set down her cup. The dark liquid inside had a bluish sheen. “We get our own crate loaded on the same train, swap the contents, nobody’s the wiser.”
“It’s a thought.” Royce leaned back, the cheap café chair buckling at the shift in weight. At the table behind him, two Yasre were arguing about sporeball, feathers snapping with each gesticulation. The air stank of burnt food.
“I’ve heard they weigh all the cargo before and after,” Royce said to the ceiling. A single fan spun uselessly overhead. “Guess they want to prove it doesn’t evaporate from the speed, or the magic. So we’d have to pass inspection coming on and off, which means identical weight… Hmm.”
“What?”
Royce sat up. “What are the target dimensions?”
“Two by two by two.” Nata pantomimed a cube. “Standard Wakenfern shipping crate, no identifying marks except the label.”
“You’re well-informed.” Royce considered. “Big. Density?”
“Say… same as water.”
“With a team of five, it would take half an hour. Ten minutes?” Royce shook his head. “As I say, can’t be done.”
Nata spread her hands. “Ok. I accept it. The job’s impossible. It can’t be done.” She drained her cup. “So how are we going to do it?”
“Nata--”
“Don’t be that way, Bellboy,” she cut him off.
“Don’t--” Royce bit down on a surge of anger. “Don’t call me that.”
Another smile. “Go on, where’s that can-do attitude you humans are so famous for?” She crumpled up the empty cup and tossed it toward a nearby garbage chute. It fell short. “Think about it.”
Outside the window, the swarm of passengers had finished boiling out of the flashtrack, and now the horde that had been milling about on the platform was piling into the train. The machine itself was a series of massive steel tubes, jointed like a serpent where they met. Except for the doors each car was smooth as quicksilver. At head and tail the train ended in a bullet-like tip.
Royce rubbed his mouth. “Who are we stealing from, anyway?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Ah, them. So even if we get the stuff, we’re dead.”
Nata’s eyes were deep, solid purple. “Only if they know it was us.”
Royce slapped the table. “The Community doesn’t play around, Nat. Those people are as real as it gets. This is deadly serious.”
With the press of mortals on the platform thinning, faint sounds of a plucked lyre began to drift into the café. Royce glanced out the window at the Primas-ika busker, watched their claws dance over the strings.
“Where’d you get all this intel, Nat?”
Another smile, no teeth. “If I tell you that, you’ll do the job without me.”
Royce chuckled. “No way. There’s only one dealer of crazy in New Bekton with the volume needed to try something like this, and she’s sitting across from me. And I’m still not convinced.”
“Come on, Royce. Do you really want to spend your whole life doing nightclub cons? Scamming up-city rich kids out of their bottle service money? Don’t you think you’re worth more than that?”
There was a quiet pause that grew long, human and elek each considering the other. The doors of the flashtrack train slammed shut and sealed with a hiss of compressed gas. The busker hit a wrong note.
Nata’Gan broke the silence with a sigh. She rummaged through her purse and extracted a syringe gun, loaded with a vial of blood-red liquid.
“I can’t believe you use that stuff,” Royce said.
Nata rolled up her sleeve and pressed the syringe against her arm, avoiding the many bruises that marked previous injection sites.
“You know what they say: the city breathes, the city bleeds, life goes on. If you don’t want to get caught up and dragged under, you’ve got to take matters into your own hands.”
The syringe gun went off with a muffled thump. Nata’s eyes instantly lightened five shades, to a pale lavender.
“Mm. Costs an arm and a leg, but to fuel the soul there’s nothing like it in the world.”
Nata leaned back as the café window began to rattle. A shimmer was building up around the train outside, a distortion in the air that made its shape seem to ripple. A stray bolt of magic arced out and fizzled against the station roof in a shower of blue sparks. Royce sighed.
Nata’Gan looked up sharply. “You’ve thought of something.”
He glanced away.
“Don’t try to deny it, I can read you like a screen. Spill it.”
“This is crazy, Nat.”
She pointed out the window. “Look at that thing. Pinnacle of mortal arrogance. Slick, shiny, unassailable. Faced with something like that, doesn’t a person just have to steal from it? Isn’t there a moral duty at least to try?”
Royce gave her a look. “Are you talking about the flashtrack, or the Community?”
Nata’s answer was lost in a bone-shaking roar as the train shot out of the station so fast that the air slammed in to fill the vacuum it left behind. The Primas-ika busker played through it all, purple-scaled hands plucking out a melody that no one could hear.
Royce stared out the window at the empty platform. He could almost see as well as hear the echoes of the train, a lingering ripple over the tracks. He looked down at the table--bare white plastic--rubbed his temples, then lifted his gaze to Nata’Gan.
“We’re gonna need a car,” he said.
Nata grinned.
Royce raised a finger. “An expensive car.”
*****
Shel’Wari beamed at the prospective buyer. The man was a promising combination: human, but with a Parathan name, that suggested wealth. Not too young--perhaps pushing forty--but dressed like a man half his age. The second son of a politician? And the name…
The buyer spun the wheel of the car, whipping them around a corner. They were already a few miles from the dealership, almost to the border with mid-city. The buyer’s purple hair whipped in the wind of their speed, his expression relaxed despite the breakneck pace. The city shield etched a checkerboard in the sky overhead.
“Mr. Prann,” Shel’Wari said, almost shouting to be heard. “If you don’t mind my asking, would you happen to be--”
“Yes, we’re related,” the buyer cut him off. “And no, I don’t know why my cousin runs the city this way.”
A pause. The governor’s cousin…
“There’s a science to it, you know.” The buyer flicked a strand of purple hair out of his face.
“Running the city?”
“Choosing a car!” He took one hand off the wheel and raised a finger. “Most people don’t realize, but you’ve got to approach the thing with an empirical attitude. Piece by piece. For example! Cornering--”
They turned so hard Shel’Wari slid across his seat and bumped up against the door. His fingers dug into the cushion as he forced himself to keep a smile on his face.
“Acceleration--”
A burst of speed slammed Shel’Wari backwards. With the top down, his eyes watered from the wind.
“Brakes--”
The sudden stop hurled him forward to be caught by the safety belt, knocking the wind from his lungs. He gasped for air, the stench of ozone clogging his nose.
“But I must say,” the buyer continued, “this little baby has met all my expectations. What a machine!”
“Yes,” Shel’Wari choked out. “The Mulo Kaln is a top-of-the-line vehicle, our fastest and most agile hovercar. I guarantee it will not only meet but exceed your expectations.”
Where were they, anyway? Shel’Wari looked around, saw a narrow alley, dirty stucco walls, garbage piled on the ground.
“Mr. Prann, perhaps we should head back to…” Cold metal against his temple. Someone there. Big. Masked.
“Get outta the car.” The voice was gravel.
Shel’Wari’s eyes darted. Two more figures, also armed, on the other side. One of them holding the buyer at gunpoint while the other climbed into the back seat.
“I said out.” A muscled arm reached past Shel’Wari and unbuckled his safety belt. Then a hand fell on his shoulder and hauled him up and out of the car as if he weighed no more than a bantam spore.
He fell in a heap between two empty crates, heart racing. The man who had grabbed him was climbing into the passenger seat, leveling his pistol at the buyer. Shel’Wari couldn’t see Prann’s reaction; the big man was blocking his view.
“Drive,” he heard the thug say, and they were gone.
*****
Royce Bell pulled into an empty lot and tore off his purple wig.
“Silent Gods, that was good! Did you boys ever consider the theater?”
“No.” The thugs climbed out, pistols holstered.
“Shame. Well, thanks a bundle. The money’ll hit your account within a week. Should be, eh, sixty percent of a used one of these babies. If you have any problems, you know where to find me.” He threw the car into gear.
“No we don’t.”
The engine roared.
“No,” Royce admitted with a grin, “you don’t.”
*****
The bureaucrat’s skin glowed Parathan-blue, sickly, an unmistakable sign that his ancestors had traded health for magic. Bald, too--no human blood there for at least a dozen generations. The office walls were hung thick with tapestries of the ancient Empire, like a curtain to block out the fact that their owner worked for an elek company, selling cargo space on a train of eleki invention.
He gave Nata’Gan the wan smile of the indulgent functionary.
“I think madam will find our rates quite--”
“Oh, you won’t see a green chip out of me until I pick up my car. Undamaged.” Boredom and disdain. She was excellent at portraying the spoiled elek brat. After all, for many years it had been the truth.
The bureaucrat’s smile flickered. “I’m afraid company policy doesn’t--”
She cut him off again. “You want collateral? From me, really?” She waved a dismissive hand. “Fine, use the wasting thing itself.”
“The… the car?”
“Yes, the car. If it’s so much as dented, I don’t want it anyway. Sell it, take your cut, wire me the rest. I’ll give you an account number.” Boredom. Disdain.
“Hmm.” The bureaucrat paused, considered his paperwork. Nata’Gan fished the syringe gun out of her handbag; gave herself a shot of the blood-red liquid.
“That seems… satisfactory, madam,” he said at last.
The man was practically salivating. Of course. He probably had arrangements with half a dozen dealerships for just this kind of situation. He would sell them the vehicle at a murderous discount, and when they resold it in turn, a part of the profit would find its way back to him. Not exactly a credit to the memory of the Parathan Empire.
The bureaucrat smiled again, this time showing a mouth full of cracked yellow teeth.
“Although I doubt it will come up. Our trains are the fastest, safest means of transporting goods across the wastes. You won’t regret shipping by flashtrack.”
He pushed a contract across the table. “Will there be anything else?”
Nata’Gan signed without looking.
“Actually, there was one thing.”
*****
Royce kept his eyes closed. The trunk was midnight-dark, but if his eyes were open his brain wouldn’t stop straining to find patterns in the black. That sort of thing could drive a man mad. So he kept them shut, and his breathing even. Each exhalation was like the roar of an ocean storm.
The trunk was lined with soft felt, gentle against his spine. That wasn’t the only reason he had insisted they use a luxury car, but it was a perk. He had felt the bump a few minutes back as the vehicle was loaded into the cargo compartment of the flashtrack. How long had it been? How long until they started?
Timing was everything. If he moved too soon, while the outer doors were open, it was all over. But if he waited too long, they could hit North Point while he was still making the switch. The shock of acceleration would be his signal, but that was a risk all its own--the rush was so strong that a large fraction of passengers passed out instantly. Would he?
The hair on Royce’s forearms stood up. Magic. He started deliberately hyperventilating, flexing his core to flood the brain with oxygen. This was the test. Now or never.
Takeoff hit him like a boxing glove to the skull. If there had been anything to see, his vision would surely have darkened. Breathe. Breathe. Pain blossomed behind the bridge of his nose, then slowly faded to a throb.
Royce hit a button on his watch, the sudden red glow casting the inside of the trunk in eerie light. Ten minutes.
*****
Windowless, dimly lit, the cabin’s design assumed its occupants would be spending their brief journey unconscious. A good bet: the few other mortals sharing the compartment with Nata’Gan had gone out like a light when they left the station. Nata had to empty her second-to-last syringe to stay awake.
She was in the rearmost passenger car, adjacent through a closed door to the baggage compartment. The forward door, meanwhile, was open, allowing a view down the entire length of the flashtrack, although it faded into obscurity long before the other end. Elek eyes did not see any better in the dark.
Most of Nata’s fellow riders were not mortal at all, not in the typical sense. Tall, broad, fungus-limbed, with fruiting bodies that blossomed into the suggestion of a head. The fact that they wore clothes marked them as Sporeborn, the most sapient of their kind. Were they unconscious, or was there just nothing here worth reacting to? Nata shifted in her seat. If one of them jumped out of the train, they’d probably be fine.
The insignia on their jerseys declared them sporeball players. A dozen. The Primas-ika next to her wore an identical jersey. The coach? Manager? The Primas-ika’s clawed hands cradled a fleshy white orb, which writhed gently like a sleeping thing. Nata’Gan was no sports fan--was this a sporeball?
She turned away; resisted the urge to crane her neck and stare at the door to the cargo vault. Her fingers itched to reach into her purse, to pull out the last red vial.
On her wrist, the time ticked down.
*****
Royce pressed himself against the curved wall of the baggage compartment. The gun was heavy in his hand--a long, solid thing, far bigger than the pistol he would normally have chosen. It looked more like a lab experiment than a weapon. A tube wrapped in wire, studded with capacitors, dials, and gauges, barely room left for a stock and trigger.
Nonlethal. Supposedly.
The guard leaned up against the compartment door. Human. Bored, checking something on a handheld screen. Holstered pistol, but the real danger was the alarm lever on the wall beside her. The Gods only knew what kind of response that would bring.
From his hiding spot, Royce could actually see the crate he was here to steal. It was one among dozens, stacked ceiling-high in a way that turned the cargo space into a maze. Just like Nata had said: standard Wakenfern design, unmarked except for the shipping label. Where did she get the intel?
He focused on the guard. One shot should do it; the key was not to hit the alarm mechanism. He shouldered the electric rifle. A few hours’ training with a new gun did not an expert make. Breathe. Breathe.
Lightning leapt from the barrel, snaked through the air between the crates, crawled over the guard’s body and sent her twitching to the floor. The gun hummed in Royce’s hands, capacitors refilling, but he was already moving. Back towards the hovercar: dump the gun, get to the crate--
Movement.
Royce spun. A second guard. Void take you, Nata, you said only one.
Back-jointed legs, feathered arms. Yasre. Royce raised the electric rifle, pulled the trigger. The weapon gave a disappointed whine. Still charging.
The Yasre guard bounded backwards, hand extended for the alarm lever. Royce sprinted forward. Too far. The guard’s fingers closed around the lever; the rifle chimed readiness.
Royce dropped to one knee and fired.
*****
The first sign that something had gone wrong was when the forward door slid noiselessly shut.
Nata’Gan checked her watch. Four minutes down. Not enough time.
She looked around. The Primas-ika coach was still unconscious, sporeball stirring restlessly in their lap. As for the Sporeborn, who could say? They sat in silence, fleshy bodies swaying with the movement of the train. If they had noticed the cabin seal itself off, they gave no sign.
Nata reached for the syringe gun. Stopped herself. Reached again. Thought better of it.
The forward door whispered open, and Nata’s blood froze.
The figure in the doorway had once been human. Beneath layers of vat-grown muscle and a grafted exoskeleton, the outline of a mortal man could still be seen. A man who had been subjected to so many enhancements that he had broken, body and mind, and been remade into a living instrument of death.
Chemis, they were called. Bonded weapons, adrenal injectors, metabolic accelerators, sub-dermal armor. Alchemy, magic, and science combined to create something wholly unnatural. Once, it was said, gryphons had been called “the world’s most perfect killing machine.” Chemis had long since taken that title.
The creature stepped forward. The compartment door slid shut behind it. The chemi’s gaze was fixed on the opposite end of the car, the entrance to the cargo space. It moved awkwardly down the length of the cabin, between the rows of seats, steps heavy. The sporeball players ignored it.
Both the chemi’s hands had been severed at the wrist. One had been replaced by a hydraulic claw, while the other ended in a tapered cone of metal, like a pencil tip made of steel. Nata’Gan had seen a tool like that before, in a slaughterhouse.
No guns. Perhaps the flashtrack company didn’t want their pet damaging the merchandise.
The creature was only two rows ahead of her. She could see the bruises where steroid injection tubes plugged directly into deep muscle. The thing stank of antiseptic.
Nata’Gan mind raced, and the chemi’s steps seemed to slow to a crawl. This was an elek’s secret weapon. She could experience several minutes of subjective time before the abomination reached her. A key advantage in science, surgery, politics… but useless if she couldn’t think of a way to delay the chemi. Time, Royce needed more time!
She silently recited the features of the cabin. Curved walls and ceiling, padded seats, door at either end. Unconscious passengers: two human, a Parathan, and of course the Primas-ika coach. The team of Sporeborn.
Not much to work with. Nata regretted not taking her last dose.
The last dose…
Time snapped back to its usual speed. The chemi strode forward. The cabin rattled as the flashtrack rounded a bend. Nata’Gan reached into her purse, pulled out the syringe gun, jabbed the needle into the sporeball in the Primas-ika’s lap, and pulled the trigger.
The effect was instantaneous. The ball shuddered and spasmed, unfurled two insectoid wings, and buzzed out of the Primas-ika’s grasp into the air. It flitted about, awkward in the confined space, colliding with chairs, walls, and passengers.
Then, as Nata had hoped, it flew into the chemi’s face, wings beating against the creature’s augmented flesh. The chemi stopped. Almost too quick to see, it snagged the wayward sporeball in its hydraulic claw, paused for a moment as if to consider the struggling thing, and then crushed it.
What happened next, Nata did not expect.
The ball burst in a puff of spores. They flooded the cabin, stained red with the injected drug, turning the pale light bloody. As one, all twelve of the sporeball players shed their lethargy and rose from their seats. The red of the floating spores seeped into their pale flesh like a blush of rage. A heartbeat’s stillness. Then they moved. One of them pushed off the back of Nata’s seat for leverage, so forceful it tore the cushion. They closed the distance in an eyeblink and hurled themselves at the chemi.
Fungal sinew met lab-grown flesh like a wave colliding with the shore. The chemi caught the first charging Sporeborn in its claw, raised the creature overhead in a violent parody of a dancer with their partner, and shattered it against the ceiling into lifeless chunks of white matter.
A second Sporeborn tackled the chemi at the waist, took it to the floor. The other ten were close behind.
*****
“The company simply cannot apologize enough for the ordeal you’ve undergone, madam,” smiled the functionary. A different bureaucrat this time, an elek with needle-filed teeth. How nice of them to send a higher-up.
“Ash the ordeal!” Nata’Gan retorted. Anger, this time. Self-righteousness. The heiress offended. “Where’s my car?”
“Ah…” the bureaucrat’s smile flagged. “It seems your vehicle suffered a dent while being loaded. Per the terms of your contract, it’s been forwarded to a local dealership for sale. If you wish to renegotiate…”
Nata silenced him with a wave. Perfect. Royce would have been back in the trunk and off the train before they even thought to start searching the cargo. The Parathan’s greed was their ally.
She stood sharply. “Well. I can’t say I’m impressed by your little enterprise. Perhaps next time I’ll travel by voidship, hmm?”
The elek bureaucrat’s mouth opened and shut wordlessly, unable to come up with a response to a woman who would travel halfway to the moon for a day trip.
Nata left him like that. Just like the good old days.
*****
The stink of unpurified air wafted in through the open warehouse door. The enviro-shield on the ocean side of the city was shorting out again, letting wisps of toxic atmosphere waft over the docks. The shouts of longshoremen mingled with the lap of water on the pier.
Nata and Royce threw their weight against a pair of crowbars wedged in the seam between two of the crate’s walls. They could go a few more minutes without rebreathers. For a chance to see the score with their own eyes.
No time to switch the cargo, not by far. But to swap the shipping labels? All the time in the world. And if there happened to be an identical crate of commensurate weight on board, labeled for delivery to an inconspicuous warehouse on the docks… What a coincidence.
The crate popped open. The sheared-off side hit the concrete floor with a resonant clang. Royce and Nata both moved to get a look inside.
“If I was expecting this and got bottled water, I’d be… peeved.” Royce said.
“Quite,” Nata agreed. “Irked, even.”
“Some score,” Royce said, half to himself. “Some job. Course, we’ve still gotta sell the stuff.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a buyer.”
“Who?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“The Community again?” Royce whistled through his teeth. “We just stole it from them!”
“Different factions.” Nata coughed, went to get her rebreather. “The Community has its internal politics, just like anywhere else. More, I’d imagine.”
She paused, rebreather in hand. “Still. Maybe we’d better lay low for a while.”
“Or skip town.” Royce had taken out his own rebreather, but he didn’t put it on.
“Maybe. At least we’ll be rich in exile.” Nata’Gan slipped the elastic strap around the back of her head. “The city breathes, the city bleeds, life goes on: eh, bellboy?”
She patted him on the shoulder and fit the air filter over nose and mouth. Turned away.
Royce stayed for a moment and stared into the open crate: rack on rack of vials, each full of liquid, blood-red.
“It certainly does, Nat.” The rebreather fit like a muzzle. “It certainly does.”
