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31: Attack
Vapor roiled around the tracks outside. I immediately recognized it as the dreadful confetti of disintegration. The roiling was very slow, but it seemed to move in a huge circular stormcloud over the stricken train, and downward in a spiral toward a point further ahead on the tracks. I knew enough of the Temporale already to understand that the Membrane had been punctured—it could not speak, it never did, but I felt its wounded anguish as it began the process of laboriously sealing off its wounds and trying to repair itself. There was no doubt that in the long term it would heal itself, but the question was—would it be in time to save us on the train? Would it feel compelled to dump us as it pinched shut the hole through which time and space were spilling and coming apart in a fog of uncoupled atoms? Another of its options was to do an energy exchange with the underverse and pass its energy to the go-dots. That would create a frozen chunk of space-time, with the underlying monopoles buzzing like a hive of ants (total metaphor; no such thing; silent, invisible, energy not radiant but expanding the go-dot particles themselves into swollen potential ready to burst; and a back-burst could do worse damage, annihilating the frozen chunk of what-where and what-when). In a microcosmic way, this was a demonstration of what was happening to the City of En itself as time and space leaked through a hole made eons earlier during the time wars (eons after our time yet). The attack on the Membrane itself made me skeptical that it was just the Balesso faction of our primitive Mars society. I instantly recognized there had to be either the Faraos, or some remnant of the Laars from a billion years ago, or their enemies, or maybe even the human factions that had warred in the time wars a billion years hence. Then I saw the relative time and date, pegged to the Common Calendar (the B.C./A.D. thing as of the Gregorian update and its 20th Century atomic corrections): 5004 CC. Five thousand and four years approximately after the Year 1 Events, if the chronometer read true, meant that the train had been stopped on its tracks in the era of my life on Mars. That could only be on purpose—no coincidence. But why, and by whom?
I learned something else interesting just then, as I stumbled about the slightly upended and silent machinery. The Membrane, while struggling to repair itself, could multiprocess. It was a very powerful organism. It could call in resources from up and down stream both in time and space, so that there could be as much of itself as needed to do what it needed to do—repair itself, while continuing to process data and make informed decisions. That's not entirely unlike how humans work in an emergency. Consider: I had blood running down my forehead from where I had been jostled in my now-damaged shower stall or sleep pod. I felt head-achy and bone-achy because my awakening had been abrupt and not with the usual warm bath of vapors and fragrant biochemicals with gentle light and music. Loose objects, boxes, cylinders, chromey bars, lay heaped in the lower end of my compartment. The door stood open and slightly disangled. I staggered out to find Trini and Sindi. All the while, the back of my mind was doing a Membrane thing—maybe aided by the Membrane—and thinking the situation through as best I could with limited data.
The train car sat slightly derailed with its front end slightly off the track toward the left. I glimpsed roiling fog, and figures moving at its edges. Those might be fellow passengers from unknown an time period shuttling to some other unknown period, or they might be the beings who had caused this disaster, or they might be some native race living midstream with a door to the Temporale, or they might be the Tuttles and Taylors of the world, already come to see what must be done. They could even be manifestations of the Membrane itself, which could spin off lifelike avatars to suit the needs of the moment. My driving need right now was to check on my companions.
I found the two priestesses alive but shaken. Trini had stumbled in to aid Sindi, and they both sat beside Sindi's sleep pod holding each other. They were draped in sheets pulled from the sleep pod. "What happened?" Sindi barked at me, as if I'd caused this whole calamity.
"I think the train was attacked." As they stared at me in a sullen daze, and I realized they were very shaken, I said: "We are lucky to be alive."
"I'm okay and you are okay," Sindi said, "but Trini isn't." She put a protective arm around the other priestess' shoulder.
"What's the matter?" I said, plunging to my knees beside Trini.
Trini couldn't seem to move well. She was propped with her back against the shattered wall of her sleep pod. She leaned slightly to one side, and her chin was on her shoulder. "Broken up inside," she whispered. She flicked her eyelids as if pointing, and I followed her gaze down to a pool of blood congealing amid the dust and debris around her thighs.
"I think she has internal bleeding," Sindi said.
I rose and fumbled about the walls. The metal walls had many symbols and tubing and notation stamped or embossed on them. One was a kind of cruciform shape with a sun beside it, and two helping hands reaching toward each other. The writing was gibberish, and the hands didn't look exactly human (the fingers were the wrong length, and no human palm folds quite that way) but the First Aid implication was obvious. I broke open a wall panel and out spilled a variety of packages, vials, tubes, scissors for cauterizing, liquids for searing, wicked looking clamps of various types, and blades and bandages. "Nothing for more complicated intervention," I muttered.
"She's bleeding from the bottom," Sindi said, having rolled the weak form of Trini forward and examining the bloody stain slowly spreading on the sheets along her bottom. Trini lay with her arms forward and her head down.
"Can she move? Can she get up?" I asked. We had minimal training in emergencies. It was mainly aimed at stabilizing the victim and summoning the proper help. I then had the only idea that could reasonably have occurred to me.
"Do what you can for her," I said. "I have to see something."
Leaving Sindi crouched over the other priestess' body, I popped open a window on the high side of the tilting car and clambered up onto the roof. I did this as silently as I could, hoping the dimly milling figures in the fog wouldn't see me. It took me several minutes to register what I was seeing. The train was wrecked. There were eight cars and a front and rear locomotive. The cars had jack-knifed in zigzag fashion—none sat on the rails. The rear locomotive lay on its side with vapor coming from its tightly sealed, armored plates. The front locomotive had run into a large boulder rolled across the tracks and shattered. Its nose was bent upward.
Trini was dying, and we were in great danger staying here. The voices of the people milling in the fog had a foreign and hostile ring to them. Maybe they were scavengers who attacked trains like this, the way coastal pirates in Victorian England had used phony lights to maliciously lure ships into breaching themselves on shore, to plunder them and leave their crews to perish in the thundering waves. But the fact that we were now sitting parallel in time with Balesso's Mars led me to the inescapable conclusion that there was a connection.
I climbed back down. "How is she?"
"In and out," Sindi said. "I think she's got hours at most."
"I have an idea."
"Shoot."
"The rear engine is on its side and the front engine is wrecked. I'm guessing that if we can get into the rear engine, we might be able to manually operate it to right itself."
"Then what?"
"We move crosstime to our own Mars. Or we manage to contact Tuttle downtime in London 2608."
"You're right. It's a total gamble, but we can't just stay here. It's better we do something."
We took Trini's limp form between us by holding her arms over our shoulders. She was surprisingly light, and we managed to stumble through the wrecked corridor to a back door that still functioned. I had a brief impression of emerging into night, and open fields—or empty space—beyond the trainbed. We staggered over thick ballast stones along our side of the train, while we could see shadowy figures moving about on the other side. We saw people moving at a surreptitious crouch. They wore turbans and carried long guns resembling rifles. We smelled oily smoke from the accident. The front engine and one or two cars had caught fire internally. "I hope nothing in there blows," Sindi said as she glanced back with fearful eyes.
"Your guess is as good as mine. That's too far in the future to worry about, even if it happens two minutes from now. Let's hope the engine is unlocked."
We heard a shout as we were discovered. There were loud popping noises, and bursts of energy glimmered on the broken scales of the train above our heads.
The Membrane let us unlock the door and we climbed down into the disabled engine. I felt a scorching heat over my head as an energy burst just missed my head. I lowered the side door over us and it was like closing the hatch on a submarine. We could hear banging all around us as the locals shot at the armored engine with all that they had, to no effect. We laid Trini on a soft surface and covered her with an emergency blanket from a kit in the wall. She was in shock, and looking gray. She was unconscious and her pulse was irrgular, feeble, fading. Sindi and I busied ourselves over the controls, which were surprisingly simple. There was that lozenge of symbols again with its stars, lines, and circles. It was frustrating—we couldn't figure out how to make it go, and our rank level wasn't high enough, so I thought the Membrane blocked us from working what controls there were.
We were, however, able to activate a large screen on which we could see what was happening outside. By moving my hand over a circle outside one corner of the screen, I was able to rotate between views. We were surrounded by scavengers in knotty blue robes and turbans, who were stripping the cars of whatever wasn't nailed down. Like ants, they passed blankets, electronics, even window glass, to their confreres outside, who packed them onto shadowy pack animals for transport. "Maybe they'll go away when they're finished looting," Sindi said.
"I don't think so. I think there is more to this than just looting. I think they are just the spear-carriers. The real force behind this has yet to show himself."
Before she could ask, or I could speculate, the screen fuzzed briefly. An image swam into view: Tuttle. "Are you safe in there?"
"Where are you?" I asked.
"Coming uptime."
"We have a very badly wounded woman and no medical help."
Taylor stuck his face in the screen. "Coming right along. I can perform most emergency surgeries, and we can evacuate her to a Temporale hospital."
"Oh Gods," Sindi said with a great sigh of relief. She made the Horizon sign over her head. I responded in the same manner.
Shortly, we saw a glorious sight. Hanging by an invisible thread, a long cylindrical capsule with rounded ends came clanking up out of the past. It moved fast, though, and left a motion blur. The natives outside scattered. They'd apparently gotten enough to satisfy them, and decided their margin of safety had outlived itself. The capsule ignored them as it stopped over our engine, then quickly lowered itself onto the door. Creating a safe seal by sucking onto the surface of the locomotive, Tuttle and Taylor pulled the door open and clambered down. Both wore dark green utility uniforms with black boots and helmet collars, though they'd left the helmets in the capsule.
"Sorry it took a while," Tuttle said. He busied himself about the controls. "Looks pretty bad," he said.
"Yes," Taylor said as he started to work on Trini. "She needs to be evacuated immediately. It's a full pull, Tuttle."
"I'll signal the Membrane."
"The Membrane's been hurt, but it may have enough power locally to effect the move."
Sindi and I linked hands and worried together. We were both quite fond of Trini and couldn't bear the thought of losing her.
"Got it," Tuttle said as symbols flickered on the screen.
"Excellent," Taylor said. "I have the bleeding stopped for now. If she is moved physically, she'll bleed to death. It's very dire."
"The Membrane is digitizing," Tuttle said without looking up. "All systems are normal and Go."
I felt a faint hum and the light in the crashed cabin seemed to dim briefly.
Sindi shrieked and pointed at Trini.
Trini lay on her back. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open, and her skin ashen. Then she began to glow faintly.
"Check..." Taylor said softly as Tuttle manipulated the controls and spoke with the membrane and an operator way uptime.
"...And away," Tuttle said.
As I watched, Trini seemed to disintegrate. Her body fell apart into glowing atoms that drifted apart. At the same time, her body flattened in one swift motion as if deflating. It was more as if she were being sucked away backwards by a vacuum behind her. She was gone. But on the screen we could see the continuation of her descent, her departure, as she appeared to fall away from us and diminish to a vanishing point. The screen showed a blinding stream of amber characters flowing from top to bottom against a black field. The stream stopped, the screen turned green, and a completion symbol appeared.
"She's home," Tuttle said. He turned and ran his fingers through tousled blond hair. "If anyone can save her, they will."
Taylor rose. He dusted his hands off and said: "I won't be needed here then."
With Tuttle's affirmation, Taylor did something strange that would have a profound bearing on my future capabilities. He twisted his hands as if unscrewing them and then tightening them again—just a quarter turn, no tortured materials. Then he held up his hands in thin air as if pushing buttons and activating keypads I could not see. Then, for a moment, I saw a full array of light gray circuitboard lines filling the air before him. It wasn't just a flat surface, but number of virtual screens that hovered all around him. As they winked out of visibility, he raised his fists. I saw him grab what looked like a pair of handles that hung from two overhead rails or tracks of the same circuitboard material. As Trini had, he started to disintegrate into fine white confetti while his body flattened and imploded backwards and a vacuum seemed to suck him away at a speed approaching that of light. I glanced at Tuttle's screen and saw the twirling, plummeting figure of Taylor disappear.
"Where did he go?" Sindi whispered as she held her fingertips over a shocked face.
Tuttle said: "I suspect he is standing by the samovar in his office, pouring himself a cup of hot tea." He winked and gave her a grin.
"And what about us?" I said.
"You'll need me for while," Tuttle said. "I was monitoring the Membrane awaiting your return, and I saw things had gone wrong. Taylor and I came as fast as we could."
"Thanks," Sindi said.
"We won't need to visit our own era on Mars then," I said.
"Well, I ran a series of checks after we spoke in the New City," Tuttle said. "Surprisingly, the Anomaly in the floor of the Olympus crater has been there for eons."
I frowned. "An artifact? A giant statue or machine or some kind made by forces other than nature?"
Tuttle said: "Yes. It's an energy source. Very feeble. Like a detection field. Feeble, but there."
"What's a detection field?" Sindi asked, saving me the effort.
"You surround an area with an electromagnetic or other energy field, depending on what you are trying to detect."
"And this giant machine that brought us into the Temporale has such a field?"
"Indeed," Tuttle said as he leaned against the wall.
"What is it trying to detect?" Sindi asked.
"Water," Tuttle said.
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