Thirty-Two Years of Rails
"So we're really doing this, huh?"
CRACK—BOOM.
A tree toppled over, and slowly, something enormous began to push its way out of the forest — a massive wooden structure.
"What the hell is that?"
"Huh? Some kind of vehicle?"
"You'd really mobilize that many people just for that?"
What looked like a gigantic palanquin carved from whole trees came crashing through the forest — and beneath it, more than a hundred people who appeared to be slaves were carrying it on their backs.
"That's just absurd."
With resources and manpower like that, they should have been building ladders or siege engines. Instead they were wasting it all on this?
"WAAAAAH!"
Doom, doom, doom.
As the great vehicle lumbered forward, the natives began beating drums and letting out war cries, clearly gearing up for something.
"I've got a bad feeling about this. Everyone's ready, right?"
"Haha. Just look at their eyes, my lady."
Glancing back, I saw the kids already pulling out ammunition pouches, rifles in hand, all of them staring hard at the treeline across the way.
Dududududoom.
The drumbeat quickened, and then people started being dragged up onto the structure. And what happened next was horrific.
"Oh, no!"
"What are they doing?"
Apparently that thing hadn't been a palanquin at all — it was a mobile execution platform. They were beheading people right up there, spraying blood.
The savages were sawing through necks with their blades, slowly, deliberately. How much agony would that be?
"Damn it! This is beyond the line! Kill them all!"
"The young lady says open fire!"
"Kill every last one of them!"
BANG! BANG! RATATATATANG!
The palisade was swallowed once again in that thick, distinctive haze of black powder as the volley began. Honestly, I was almost grateful for the smoke — at least it hid the sight from view.
The kids kept firing into the murk until it finally began to clear.
"UWAAAGH!"
"!#%!"
"GRAK! #^@@$"
Well, of course they were stunned. Lightning had just rained down out of nowhere — thunderous noise, then men dropping left and right as if struck by something unseen. Panic was only natural.
"WAAAAH!"
"Keep firing! They're charging!"
Who knew how many of them were hiding in that forest, but whatever came stumbling out of it wasn't going to see home again today.
There was one annoyance, though: no matter how many rifles we had, this black powder belched so much smoke that we had to wait for even a little of it to drift off before we could see what we were shooting at.
And so, inevitably, the mass of natives kept pressing closer and closer to our palisade.
"Keep shooting as they advance, and prepare for close quarters!"
Fist Potatoes were sadly out of the question here — it was a wooden palisade, and one bad throw would tear our own wall apart.
Still, we were all in steel plate armor, so the odds were overwhelmingly ours. And we had the high ground, didn't we? It wasn't much of a height, but they had no ladders — I had to admire the sheer nerve of charging at a wall with nothing but your bare hands.
"Why on earth are they coming without any equipment?"
"Do they think they can leap over it somehow?"
"Or are they planning to pile up corpses and climb those?"
It was a real possibility, too. People were still come pouring out of the forest in droves.
The railway hadn't reached us yet, so our fort wasn't all that large to begin with.
"Ugh, they're right on top of us already!"
"Stay calm, my lady. Let's trust the men."
They were fighting well — it was just that the other side was doing everything they could think of, loosing arrows, hurling fire at the wall, the works.
And over there, parts of the enemy line had actually caught fire and were burning away!
"Gah!"
"Wow. So that's a thing they do?"
When the savages realized nothing else worked, they did something absurd: a human pyramid. They stacked themselves into a tower and started swarming up it.
"They're on the wall! Reserve squad, move — NOW!"
"RUN!"
We'd held the reserves back to guard the gate in case it got battered down. Never in a thousand years did I expect them to climb the palisade.
They'd thrown up that pyramid in an instant and were crawling over it like ants.
"DIE!"
"Not one step further, you vermin!"
"You DARE bring yourselves here!"
The kids hacked away with their axes for all they were worth, but there was no stopping the line from being pushed back. The enemy simply had too many bodies.
"Don't break formation! Hold the line!"
"Keep your heads!"
They'd clearly been through this before — covering each other's weak spots, fighting steady and coordinated. But as the minutes wore on, a new problem emerged: so many corpses were piling up on the palisade that our line was being forced to step back.
The encirclement around each climbing point kept widening, and we needed more and more men to hold it.
"What are you waiting for! Shoot the human ladder! Take out the ones at the bottom and the whole thing comes apart, doesn't it?"
The commander, clearly fed up, was driving the kids on.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
"AAAAGH!"
It wasn't even hard. Lean out, fire — a few bullets into the base of the pyramid and the whole human tower came crashing down in one go.
"Ughhhh…."
"@$^(@$(!#"
Outside the palisade it was sheer chaos — tangled bodies, shattered limbs, men crushed under the weight of their own collapsed tower.
How many people were dying here? In just a few short hours, the dead had piled up everywhere.
"We've bought time! Clear the bodies off the wall and keep firing!"
Ugh…. Apparently not even the corpses fazed them — the kids hurled the dead over the side with one hand and kept shooting with the other.
The battle still looked a long way from over.
Bang tatatang tang. Thudududook.
Every time we fired bullets, they answered with arrows. Stone arrowheads, no less…. The black, glassy-looking points were apparently obsidian, but against steel armor they meant nothing. Unless one flew through the narrow gap of a helmet visor at exactly the wrong angle — a long, long shot — they didn't leave so much as a scratch.
"You can't get through STEEL, you idiots! Hahaha!"
"Don't get cocky!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
Everyone else ducked and popped up in rhythm, but that one kid just stood there tall and exposed, blazing away. He was asking for trouble.
There's always an "if" in war, and this boy had no sense of fear at all…. Not that the tension of the fight was beginning to ebb, in any case.
"It seems they've all come out now…."
The flow of people emerging from the forest had thinned to a trickle. The battle was winding down.
And yet, I couldn't understand it at all.
"Why do they fight like this, to the death?"
"Perhaps they're slave soldiers of a sort, my lady. If they retreat, they go back to become sacrifices themselves…."
There was no retreat. It was a war of annihilation, fought until one side lay entirely dead.
I truly couldn't wrap my head around it. Did they simply not want to live?
"I heard from one of the other natives, back before — they said the warriors eat a drug that strips away their fear in battle. I imagine that's what this is."
"Drugs!"
Here in South America? It's not like they couldn't have gotten their hands on something up here.
Right. It must have been the drugs! No wonder they'd hurled themselves at us without a shred of fear, right up until they died.
"Drugs, my lady?"
"Yeah. The devil's medicine. It makes you feel wonderful, makes you feel like you can do anything. That's how people fall in. Before they know it, they're addicted."
Hm? Wouldn't that just be a hormonal imbalance, some internal effect? In theory, couldn't Holy Water treat it?
"We should be on our guard, then."
"We should. It has its good uses, but in the wrong hands it's the perfect tool for destroying people."
No. I don't even want to experiment with it. Drugs must be controlled, absolutely.
Though medical applications would have to be tolerated at least a little. Holy Water has its limits, after all.
"To even understand things like this, medicine has to advance faster."
"There are plenty of children eager to study it. It will improve."
Holy Water works wonders against disease — like an antibiotic the body doesn't even mount an immune response to. It heals wounds too, but here's the problem: it heals them exactly as they are.
Suppose you treated someone with a bone out of alignment — it would set just like that. That's why so many of the kids ended up with lasting disabilities.
"I want them to focus on surgery. Real surgical medicine."
"Yes, my lady."
I didn't know how far we could take it, but the plan had to be: illness to Holy Water, trauma to the scalpel.
"ANYONE who wants to sleep hugging a corpse tonight, step forward!"
"NO, COMMANDER!"
"UWOOOOO!"
With the battle over, cleanup was beginning.
"Then move fast! Squads one through eight, recon sweep on the perimeter!"
"Yes!"
"Understood!"
"Move out!"
There were so many dead that they gathered them in heaps here and there, doused them in oil, and set them burning.
The stench of burning flesh, the black smoke, the setting sun all blending together — for a moment I almost wondered if this place wasn't hell itself.
"Should we really be protecting a civilization like this?"
"Hard to say…. It's too horrifying to write off as merely a difference of custom."
If it were just their own people chosen from within for human sacrifice, and wars among themselves, I might have been willing to look the other way to a degree.
But it didn't take a genius to guess that they conquered the tribes around them and dragged the captives off as slaves to do all this.
And with fewer than three hundred of us here, cutting through that vast forest to find the Aztecs was simply beyond us.
"Just you wait until the railway is finished…."
The Aztecs were going to get it, right? The nomads don't even wear proper clothes, so it should be them, shouldn't it?
It's disgusting! Thirty-two years we've been laying track!
On the Original Continent the kids had been slapping rails down at a furious pace, so I never imagined it — but railway construction takes far longer than I thought.
"I figured flat ground would make it easy."
"Haha! It's precisely because it's flat that it's hard, my lady."
Apparently the ground here was mostly swamp, so they had to churn up the earth, replace it with gravel, and only then lay the rails on top.
And the forest — don't even get me started. The forest was colossal. Felling trees was no small task in itself, and since the ground had to be converted, they had to dig the roots out entirely.
Then there was the gravel to spread underneath — the perennial problem. Since the line cut straight across the middle of a plain, if we ever ran short, we'd have no choice but to freight it in by rail from the north.
"But thirty-two years? Isn't that taking things a bit far?"
"Thanks to which, I've had a very restful posting, my lady. Hehehe."
Once the track work finished and the first train came in today, the second Moses would be leaving.
The first Moses had gone back ages ago.
"By the way — the next one will also be called Moses?"
"That is correct."
"Is there a reason?"
"Hmm. It's said to have been a title held by a great leader of antiquity. Think of it like your Prime Minister, my lady — an office, not a name."
Ah. So that's why the next person was also named Moses. When the third Moses arrived on today's train, the two would exchange duties.
And then the second Moses would retire to the Temple to organize the mountain of notebooks he'd filled over the years and compile them into books.
"Nothing eventful ever happened here. How do you have that many notebooks?"
What had he even been writing in them, besides incidents?
"One never runs out of things worth recording, my lady."
"Like what, roughly?"
"For instance — the time you personally saw to the burial of a staff member killed in a native raid."
We'd been fighting those savages for a full thirty-two years. They hid somewhere in that forest and ambushed us, and every so often someone got hurt — once, it seemed, one of our men fell into a pit they'd dug and was buried alive. I couldn't bear to imagine how much he'd suffered.
The squadmate who'd gone out with him had tried to save him, but by the time he'd fought off the ambushers and reached the pit, it was already too late.
"What do they even want from us?"
"They must have their reasons…."
Those savages never spoke. They refused every attempt at contact — which meant we had no choice now but to play our final card.
Until now we'd fought them with small arms alone, but from here on out, explosives would be joining the conversation.
We'd already located their main base, too.
REEEEEEET!
"Sounds like we have a visitor."
How long would it take those savages to figure out that the train was our lifeline — the artery through which every weapon we had flowed in?
Not that it mattered if they did. The hundred-li stretch from Nanpyeong to Ara bristled with fifty forts, each garrisoned by a hundred to two hundred men.
On top of that, telegraph lines ran the length of the railway, so relief columns from nearby could arrive within hours.
SCREEEECH— HIISSS.
"Unloading cargo! Dangerous materials — careful with those!"
The workers began offloading cannons, shells, and crates of explosives.
From here, we intended to blast a perfectly straight road straight to the savages' front yard — and if we ran short along the way, we'd come back, resupply, and push on again.
"My greetings, my lady. I am Moses."
"Huh? A woman?"
"Is something the matter?"
Hm. Right, the world had changed quite a bit. Still — they'd sent someone remarkably young?
Introductions could wait; first things first, it was time to see the old one off.
REEEEEEET!
"Time to go already?"
"It has been an honor to serve you, my lady."
Where there are meetings, there are partings — and yet it never stopped stinging.
"I'll come see you in the capital sometime, won't I?"
"Hahaha! You said the exact same thing to my predecessor, and you never once came!"
"Oh. Didn't I?"
Can't be helped…. Your time and mine simply don't run at the same pace.
"Thank you. Truly."
"The honor was mine, my lady."
With that flat, matter-of-fact farewell, he boarded the train and was gone. He didn't even glance back through the window once — what a cold fish.
"Well then, new Moses, you're coming with me. A woman too, so we can share a room."
"Is… is that permitted?"
"Why wouldn't it be? What, are you secretly a man?"
"NO!"
Such an outburst. For a second there I honestly wondered if she was a man on the inside.
Aztecs, you savages — just you wait a little longer! I'm coming for you!