The Suspicious Inspector
The man with the red armband clamped his mouth shut.
He glanced warily at Irina before bending low again, resting his index finger against the iron housing of the axle box.
"A slight surface warmth tells you nothing about the internal friction," he said, his voice clipped and defensive. "When bearings seize up deep inside the axle, it takes time for the heat to bleed through the cast-iron cover."
"Then open it up right here."
Section Chief Irina didn't even lift her eyes from the clipboard.
The man snapped his head upward. "Right here, ma'am?"
"You came to conduct an inspection, didn't you? You're the one who barred our departure, so verify it on the spot."
Irina kept the clipboard firmly in her grasp, waiting without a flicker of impatience. The man's jaw tightened. He cast a sideways glance toward the two grease-stained mechanics lingering behind him. A dwarf mechanic carrying a crowbar clicked his tongue and knelt down first, while his human partner set a heavy leather toolbag onto the platform flagstones.
The axle box cover was secured to the bearing casing by side hinges. Working with practiced efficiency, the dwarf pulled the cotter pins with a wrench and jammed the flat wedge of his crowbar into the seam. With a sharp, brittle crack, hardened black grease gave way, and the square steel plate swung open.
The sight revealed inside was appalling.
The felt wick—meant to soak up lubricant and feed it continuously to the brasses—was barely half its proper length. It wasn't worn down by friction, either; the edge was sheared perfectly straight, as though severed with a razor-sharp blade. The bottom reservoir was practically dry, and around the drainage petcock were fresh, bright scratches where a wrench had recently stripped the brass.
When the dwarf yanked the felt remnant free and held it up, not a single drop of oil bled out.
"This isn't an overheated axle!" the dwarf roared, his thick brow knotting with sudden fury as he shook the dry scrap. "Somebody bled every damn drop of oil and cut the wicks clean in half just to make it seize!"
Irina's gaze snapped onto the man with the red armband like a vice.
"Who was the last crew logged to inspect this wheelset?"
"I—it must have been the crew at the origin yard," the man stammered, stepping back. "We were only dispatched after the line watchpost phoned in an emergency alert—"
"I'll be checking your personal inspection log as well. Have you touched this axle box today?"
The man froze, the blood draining from his face.
The dwarf hurled the dry felt to the stones and leveled a stubby, grease-caked finger at him. "We never laid eyes on the belly of this train until five minutes ago! This bastard hauled us out here himself, waving an urgent dispatch from the signal post!"
The inspector's right heel shifted subtly backward. His posture coiled. The loose forms slipped from his fingers. Ah. I know that stance.
"Chief, he's bolting!"
The instant the shout left my lips, the man flung his metal clipboard straight at the dwarf's face. Shoving his fellow mechanic violently aside, he pivoted on his heel and broke into an all-out sprint toward the platform stairs.
While Irina caught the stumbling mechanic by the collar to keep him on his feet, I slung my Type 91 Rifle off my shoulder and shoved it into her hands.
"Sonya!"
"I'll have him back in a minute!"
The central concourse was packed with stranded travelers. The runner barreled through the crowd like a battering ram, kicking aside luggage trunks, parasols, and wicker fruit hampers. Screams, gasps, and furious curses erupted across the platform in a rolling wave.
Instead of wrestling through the congested pedestrian corridor, I cut toward the edge, vaulting onto the outer line of iron support pillars that flanked the tracks. The fugitive ripped off his glaring red armband and flung it under a waiting-room bench, but that drab grey worker's smock stood out clearly enough amidst the coats and dresses.
A heavy baggage cart loomed directly across my path. I didn't bother breaking stride. Planting my left palm on the push-bar, I launched myself cleanly over it. My trouser cuffs barely skimmed the wooden freight deck before my boots hit the flagstones, kicking off into an explosive burst of momentum. In a heartbeat, I closed the gap until I was breathing right down his collar.
He glanced back over his shoulder, eyes wide with terror.
At the far end of the platform stood a waist-high iron safety railing, beyond which lay three active rail lines over coarse ballast gravel. Without an instant's hesitation, he hurled himself over the fence and dropped toward the tracks below.
Right on cue, a compact steam shunter hauling an empty passenger rake came chugging across the second line at low speed. A deep, deafening horn blast ripped through the yard, spewing a thick shroud of choking black coal smoke and scalding white steam into the air. The man slipped across the shunter's cowcatcher by mere inches, vanishing into the plume on the far side.
I placed a single palm on the rail and vaulted into the drop.
The jolt of the gravel bed drove a heavy shudder through my knees, but I let the kinetic force roll forward into a hard sprint. Scorching radiator heat and stinging coal cinders whipped across my cheeks as I tore through the trailing steam cloud. Just ahead, the man was scrambling desperately toward the skeletal steel framing of an open repair shed.
I doubled my stride.
As he cut wide around a pyramid of spare wheelsets, I sliced straight through the inner radius and latched onto his shadow. Realizing there was nowhere left to run, he skidded to a dead halt on the gravel and whipped around.
Shring, clack.
From the inside lining of his work boot, a heavy folding stiletto snapped open. He drove the blade upward, angling a vicious thrust toward my right flank.
I read the muscle twitch in his shoulder before the blade even moved and twisted my torso half a turn. The steel point whistled past my coat lapels with a razor's margin. In the same breath, my left hand shot out like a sprung trap, locking onto his weapon wrist with crushing force.
Using his pinned arm as an axis, he spun fluidly, whipping his opposite elbow toward my temple in a brutal counterstrike. I dipped my chin, catching the strike against my braced right forearm, and stepped back with my left foot to let his follow-up knee strike slice empty air.
This wasn't the clumsy flailing of an ordinary railroad greaser. Even with a limb seized, he flowed into consecutive close-quarters counters without missing a beat. He was a trained brawler.
Planting his heels, the man threw his entire body weight backward to rip his wrist from my grip. But the grip strength of an augmented human with a decade of imperial tempering didn't budge an inch. I tightened my fingers just a fraction, and a sickening crunch echoed beneath his leather work glove as his carpal joints ground together.
"Aaargh...!"
His fingers spasmed open, and the stiletto dropped into the gravel.
Wrenching his crushed wrist downward, I hooked my left leg behind his ankles. With the textbook leverage of a classic judo sacrifice throw, I sent his entire grown-man bulk wheeling through the air over my shoulder.
SLAM!
His back struck the ballast gravel with a hollow, breath-stealing thud. A strangled wheeze tore from his throat. Before he could even thrash, I flipped him onto his stomach, dragged his right arm behind his back until the joint creaked, and yanked a thick leather tool lanyard from his belt, binding both his wrists in two swift, inescapable turns.
"Wh—who the hell are you...?" he choked out, spitting gray dust.
"Shut your mouth."
I patted down his pockets without hesitation. From his breast pocket emerged a stamped brass railway identity tag and a tightly folded slip of paper. It was a section cut from the Northwest Trunk Line timetable. The scheduled arrival window for Train 42 at the Fourth Transfer Station was circled in thick red ink, flanked by a scrawl in heavy graphite.
From his opposite pocket came a tin pack of low-grade Cheonghoecho, embossed with a crude blue-leaf motif. I gave it a quick shake; it rattled with satisfying heft.
Score. Free smokes.
I tucked the tin straight into my shirt, then pocketed his coin purse as well—two silver marks and seven copper pieces. Finally, I folded the stiletto and jammed it alongside his badge and the schedule slip into my coat lining.
Down the yard, station guards were finally blowing their brass whistles, boots crunching toward us in a clumsy stampede. The captive ground his teeth and snarled that he could walk on his own feet, but I saw no reason to humor him. Grabbing his belt and collar in one hand, I hoisted him over my shoulder like a sack of grain and marched back toward the platform.
Outside Coach 8, four nervous station constables and the stationmaster himself stood waiting, pale as chalk. Section Chief Irina was leaning against the carriage with my Type 91 Rifle resting upright in her hand. The moment I dumped the saboteur onto the flagstones, she passed the rifle back. While waiting, I quietly thumbed five rounds into the internal magazine, leaving the chamber empty.
"Are you hurt?" she asked quietly.
"Just caught my hem on a cart," I replied, pulling the brass badge and the timetable clipping from my coat and handing them over.
The stationmaster took one look at the serial stamp on the brass plate and hollered at his clerk to bring the master duty log. The badge belonged to one Ernst Hager. He was indeed an accredited line inspector assigned to the northern sector—except the roster clearly marked him down as 'Officially On Leave' for the entire week.
The vestibule door of Coach 8 clicked open, and Orban stuck his grizzled head out into the cold air.
"What's the circus out here?"
"Someone drained the grease from our axle box," I said. "The fake inspector tried to run for it, so I dragged him back."
Orban glanced down at the confiscated schedule note, rubbing the grey stubble along his jawline. "If their goal was to wreck the train and derail us, they wouldn't have bothered flagging us down right in front of our own eyes. If they'd let us roll, the axle would've welded itself solid within ten miles."
His dark eyes hardened. "Which means someone desperately needed Train 42 pinned down at this specific platform for an hour."
The dwarf mechanic raised his lantern, shining the beam into the dry wheel casing before shaking his head grimly. "If you'd hit main-line speeds bone dry like that, the carriage would've rolled over. To seat new wicks, flush out the metal shavings, and inspect the bearing sleeves for heat fractures, this train isn't moving for at least an hour. Minimum."
The stationmaster clicked his tongue and pointed toward the signal office. "I'll wire dispatch and the preceding stations immediately to hold traffic and clear the line."
A clerk sprinted for the office. But not two minutes later, he came tumbling back out onto the platform, his face drained of every drop of color, gasping for breath.
"S-Stationmaster!"
"What is it now?"
"The telegraph lines are completely dead! Southbound and northbound lines—neither is getting through! Someone took a knife to the back of the relay room—the primary trunk cables and the auxiliary backups were severed clean through!"
The stationmaster whipped out his pocket watch. The dwarf mechanic dropped his tools.
Severed telegraph wires meant there was no way to warn incoming traffic of the blockage. They couldn't rely on the mechanical signals alone. The stationmaster began shouting at the top of his lungs for visual signal crews.
Irina's eyes went glacial. "Stationmaster, clear the passengers off the platform into the interior waiting halls and seal the gates. Damaging this axle was never about a mechanical failure. It was bait to freeze us in place."
"Signal runners! Move, damn you, move!" the stationmaster bellowed.
Station hands snatched bundles of red warning flags and heavy lead track torpedoes, sprinting for their lives along the gravel toward the north and south approaches.
"Stationmaster," I broke in, "what's running behind us?"
He wiped a sheet of cold sweat from his forehead, staring frantically at his pocket watch. "Freight Train 64 is trailing you from the south, and Passenger Train 18 inbound from Karmin is due to pull in from the north at any second!"
The timing matched the penciled memo on the saboteur's slip with terrifying precision.
Cripple Train 42's axle to buy an hour. Cut the telegraph lines to blind the network. A freight train bearing down from behind, an inbound passenger service charging from the opposite direction—forcing the yard staff to improvise track diversions under blind panic.
Right on cue, a series of sharp, deafening detonations cracked from the southern approach.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Track torpedoes. The emergency cartridges clipped to the rails had exploded under heavy steel wheels. A screech of tortured iron followed as Freight Train 64 clamped its emergency brakes, grinding to a shuddering halt just outside the station yard.
Before anyone could breathe a sigh of relief, three identical cracks shattered the air from the winding northern gorge.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
SCREEEEECH—CLANG!
Northwest Trunk Line Train 18, descending from the direction of Karmin, spotted the frantic red flags and threw its shoes against the wheels, sliding violently into the yard. Guided by the emergency point switches the staff had thrown just moments prior, the massive black locomotive diverted away from our track, grinding to a halt along the adjacent, empty Track 2.
Two titanic steel beasts now sat parallel, facing each other across a narrow strip of stone platform.
The passenger doors of Train 18 swung open. Uniformed conductors tried to step down to keep travelers inside, but they were shoved aside as half a dozen figures disguised as ordinary passengers spilled down the boarding steps.
A burly man with a leather traveling grip; a beastfolk woman with her grey cap pulled low; a stooped old laborer; two lean young men; and a broad-shouldered figure wrapped in the coarse brown cowl of a monk. Their ages and attire varied, but their eyes locked onto a single target.
Coach 8 of Train 42.
Every one of them carried a parcel or bag in their left hand, while their right hands remained buried deep inside their coats and cloaks, eyes flicking across the station guards to map the firing lanes.
Here they are. The real hit squad.
I gripped the bolt of my Type 91, wrenched it back, and drove it home with a sharp snap.
Clack.
One round in the chamber.
The man carrying the leather grip stepped forward, striding past the safety ropes guarding Coach 8.
"We've brought specialized replacement parts for the axle casing," he announced, his voice smooth and devoid of panic.
"Which depot dispatched you?" I asked, keeping the muzzle lowered at a slight angle.
His eyes narrowed into slits. "I don't think we have the leisure to check manifests right now, miss."
"Open the bag."
A faint, derisive smirk touched the man's lips. He sank slowly onto one knee, working the brass buckles of the grip. But as the leather flap parted, there were no felt wicks or grease cans inside—only the cold, blued steel of two compact submachine guns nestled against stacked drum magazines.
The instant his right hand darted inside—
BANG—!
My Type 91 barked first.
The heavy 7.62mm rifle round punched straight through his right shoulder joint. A wet scream tore from his throat as the kinetic shock hurled him backward onto the stone.
At that signal, the beastfolk woman behind him whipped a heavy revolver from her shawl and pulled the trigger.
BANG!
The bullet buzzed past my ear like an angry hornet, gouging a spark out of Coach 8's armored plating. Without missing a beat, I whipped the long steel barrel of the Type 91 in a rising arc, cracking it across her wrist. The revolver spun away across the stones.
She lunged forward with a vicious roundhouse kick, but I drove the rifle's solid walnut stock directly into her sternum. Catching her off-balance, I lowered my shoulder and plowed her backward, slamming her full-force into the side plating of Train 18.
THUD!
Her head struck the steel carriage wall, and she crumpled limp to the ground.
Before I could turn, two smoke canisters popped in the middle of the platform.
Hssssssss—!
A curtain of greasy black smoke billowed upward, blinding the lamps. Through the haze, the hunched old man brandishing a lead-weighted club and the two young men with drawn pistols charged toward Coach 8.
CLANG—!
A brilliant arc of silver cleaved the black fog. Irina's massive greatsword flashed through the air, shearing a flying pistol bullet clean in two. In the next breath, she drove the heavy pommel of her hilt straight into the gunman's solar plexus, folding him onto his knees in an instant.
I deflected the old man's club with my rifle barrel and drove the buttstock up under his jaw in a sharp, snapping uppercut, knocking him cold before he hit the platform. The final young man lunged for the door handle of Coach 8, but I seized him by the scruff of his collar and slammed him face-first into the flagstones.
CRACK!
Five hostiles, down in less than ten seconds.
Yet right as the smoke began to thin, a deafening hiss of high-pressure steam roared from the head of Track 1.
HISSSSS—CHUG-CHUG-CHUG!
The sixth man—the one in the brown monk's cowl. He hadn't joined the assault on the platform at all. He had slipped straight into the locomotive's cab and yanked the regulator wide open.
With a violent jolt of its drive rods, Train 42 lurched forward, dragging the sabotaged Coach 8 along behind it as iron wheels sparked against the rails.
"We have to stop that engine!" Irina shouted.
I racked the bolt of the Type 91, sending a smoking brass casing spinning into the air, and shoved a fresh round into the chamber.
Then I took off down the platform, chasing the accelerating locomotive. It hadn't gathered full steam yet; I could still catch it. But if I pushed my reinforced body to absolute maximum output now, my legs would seize up before I ever reached the cab. Gritting my teeth, I lengthened my stride and leaned hard into the sprint.