The Steam Mole (6 page)

“This boong attacked me, sir. Attacked me without reason or provocation. I think he's mad,” said the foreman.

And it just went downhill from there. It was obvious that the shift-captain was not going to let Tim speak or defend himself.

“I can't demote you, because you're already as low as an employee can go, but I'm going to dock you three weeks pay. Next step is to fire you. And unless you fancy walking back to Sheba, don't make me do that,” said the shift-captain.

“Go ahead,” said Tim, sullen.

That finally got Shift-captain Vister to stop his rant. He shut his mouth like a steel trap. Finally he snarled, “I can't. But I'm going to lock you up until we get back to the power station, you insolent pup. And the report I'm going to write on you will make sure you never get another job in Westralia. That sort of reputation gets around.”

Tim looked around at the watchers. Almost the entire shift was there, as the steam mole made its way back to the power station after their thirty-six hour shift. Not one soul had said a word in his defense.

“Go ahead, throw me off,” he said again. Anything had to be better than being in here with this lot.

The shift-captain looked like a trapped rat, eyes darting around. Obviously he'd threatened something a bit beyond his power.

And then someone sniggered.

The shift-captain slammed his hand down on the central reservoir, echoing, silencing everyone. “Stop the train,” he said.

No one moved. “You heard me,” he shouted. “Stop the mole. This boong gets off
now
. He can walk back to the power station.”

“You can't do that, sir,” said someone.

“Watch me, Samuels. And don't you give me any of your lip or I'll dock you three weeks pay, too. And any of the rest of you!”

The mole came to a shuddering halt.

“It'll kill him out there, sir. He can't breathe in the tunnels.”

“See if I care. Only good one of these blackfellers is a dead one.”

“At least let him out at the emergency exit.”

“A weeks pay, Samuels. But yes. He can hold his breath, or breathe his own stink that long, and then walk back to the power station. All he has to do is follow the termite run for six miles.”

Tim found himself hauled off by the shift-captain and the foreman and hustled along to the lock.

And pushed out into the darkness.

Tim fell off the high step, down and out into the dark. He managed to catch himself on his hands, landing against the wall of the
termite run, half the breath knocked out of him by the fall. He had little choice but to breathe the smoky stuff out there. Fortunately, they were a long way from the cutting edge, and the air pumped from the power station to here was not quite unbreathable…not for a breath or so.

The lock clanged shut. And with a dragon hiss and a shower of sparks, the huge steam mole began to move away. Tim had to flatten himself against the wall to avoid being crushed by drill bits sticking out of the drill head.

In a sudden panic Tim ran after the steam mole, falling over the sleepers they laid for the mole rails. Gasping. Trying to yell.

He couldn't run very far in this air. Panting, he leaned against the wall, trying to think, trying not to panic. Surely they couldn't just abandon him here.

The sparks of the mole and its
clack-clack
sounds grew farther away.

The air in here would surely kill him before he could walk out. He felt nauseous and weak already, but tried to think calmly, which was just so difficult. There were breather holes and emergency exits every half a mile. The question was, was he near one, or just past one? He stood still trying to decide, swaying on his feet. Then he moved forward, feeling the wall. It was totally dark, and the steam mole's sounds grew ever more distant.

He was just getting to think he might try crawling when his hand hit wood instead of cast concrete…and then the heavy wheel of a door screw.

It took all he could offer of his strength to haul the screw open and pull himself into the shaft. The air there was stale, but better. Still, climbing the metal staples to the upper hatch was incredibly hard work—not because it was, but because of how Tim was feeling. At the top, he hauled at the latch, nearly falling from the ladder as it suddenly opened.

To a blast of heat…and air.

Hot out there or not, Tim clambered out on hands and knees. The sun beating down on him was hot…but joyous. He crawled away from the hole. There wasn't much logic in doing that, he just didn't want to be near it.

Jack Calland was unceremoniously turfed out of bed. “Move. Yer back on the work squads.”

“I thought I had to be looked after. I think I'm dying,” said Jack, groaning for all he was worth.

“Go ahead and die,” said the warder, kicking him in the ribs. Jack rolled away, weighing his chances. They didn't seem too good. There was another warder in earshot. “Orders from the commandant. He must have had word from on high that we don't need yer anymore. So I can get the dogs, or yer can get moving.”

Jack cursed to himself and staggered to his feet. It had to be today. Just when things were finally so close. He'd planned to become a corpse tonight. Well, a living one. But he'd found out where the morgue was, and that he could get into it. And the corpses of the prisoners were dumped into the river for the crocodiles. Only Jack had seen the river from the camp perimeter. It was more dry mud than water this time of year. There were crocodiles, but they took the first few corpses and took their time to come back for the rest. Jack planned…well, hoped, to either get away before that, or be at the back of the pile.

He'd actually been getting better, not sicker. Fluids, rest, and some food…and he was no longer walking on the edge of death. He'd taken care not to let the “hospital” know that. But now…they didn't seem to care anymore. Something had changed, and it had to be something to do with Mary. He wished desperately he knew what it was.

Well, he'd just have to play dead and get dumped with the corpses. In the huge prison compound there were at least four or five every day, victims of the tropical heat and diseases. Jack knew the Empire put scanty value on their lives. He was just puzzled as to why they bothered to have a camp here, where even the warders suffered. Prisoners arrived, and prisoners were taken away. And when they went, they didn't come back.

Jack's plans were cast into turmoil again when he found himself being leg ironed and forced to shuffle out of the camp attached to six other prisoners. He was going to find out for himself just where the prisoners went.

They did not have to walk far. The railway line had a crude roof over it, with a narrow slit in it to allow smoke out. The prisoners were herded onto cattle trucks going west. The manacles were locked onto the bars of the truck and the guards retreated to a caboose that gushed out a fog of cold air as they opened the door.

“Freezer wagon. For meat. Hope the bastards get stuck in it and freeze,” said his neighbor on the line of manacles, a dark-skinned man with lank, curly hair. Jack guessed him to be one of the aboriginals. Quite a lot of the prisoners were black.

“So where are we going?” Jack asked. It was no time, yet, for the infamous Jack Calland sense of humor. He needed serious answers first.

“Work on the railway,” said his companion in a tone of voice he might have used if he'd said “step out in front of the firing squad.”

It soon became apparent that this was pretty much exactly what it did mean. Jack's fellow prisoners knew very little about this railway going to the west. Except that no one came back, and only the irredeemable had gone…at first. Now, they were sending everyone. Even those who'd got drunk and been in town after curfew and got into a punch up with the police, like his new chain companion, Quint.

“So what did you do, man?” asked Quint.

That was an interesting question. “Headed up the efforts to
destroy the British Empire's hold over Ireland,” was an answer he'd avoided giving so far. Protesting innocence might not be a good idea either. This was a one-way trip, and it was unlikely Quint was a spy. “I'm Irish. I was involved in the rebellion.”

“Yeah. Seen a few o' your kind.”

It didn't sound as though he was too happy about the experience. But then, this was not a place for joyous meetings. It was dark, hot, and the air smoky. The “tunnel,” with its hand's width of gap in the roof, did keep off the direct sun, but that was all you could say for it. Jack was an engineer by training, and it all reeked of haste and incompetence. It wasn't that strong, he was sure. And the rail the leg irons were attached to was barely a quarter inch of mild steel, if he was any judge. A hastily welded rod to convert a cattle truck into a prisoner transport.

“Have you thought about escape?” he asked Quint.

“Don't be stupid. Where are you gunna go? And we're chained together.” Quint paused, then asked, “I suppose you got a file?”

Something about the pause, and the spying within the prison in New Dublin, made Jack pause himself. “Just wondering.”

He kept his peace after that, squatting down and surreptitiously testing the bar. It bent a little…

Later, when the train stopped and warders came with water buckets, he learned just how wise he'd been not to speak further.

“He's talking about escaping,” said his neighbor to the warder with the bucket. It was a very valuable bucket of water. It came from the refrigeration truck—not out of kindness, Jack suspected, but just because that was where the warders were. The warders walked down the line with a trusty and a bucket. You had the time it took for them to walk it to take a dipper and scoop and drink and get it to the man next to you to use—and heaven help you if you took too long to drink and the next man missed out. He'd probably kill you, and the warders wouldn't stop him.

The warder paused, enabling Jack's treacherous neighbor to steal
another dipper full of that glorious cold water. “Yeah? Ponty, you better search this one.” He poked Jack with his club. And there was no water for him.

Ponty—a flat-faced warder with long, thin, hard fingers—hauled Jack up by the hair, from where he sat slumped against the wall. Jack was last in the chain-gang group. “Yer looks like trouble,” he said, digging fingers into anyplace a prisoner could hide anything.

It could have been awkward if Jack had had anything for him to find. As it was, he was just searched, roughed up a bit, and missed his chance at a drink of cold water.

“Escape,” the tall man with the odd accent had said, “escape.” Up to now Lampy Green had only been thinking of dying.

He shouldn't have done it. If he'd thought about what might happen he wouldn't have. If he'd known that it would lead to him being chained like a dog, he would have just walked away.

But actually, he knew he wouldn't have. Part of him hated himself to the core. The bastard had been his father. He shouldn't have done it. But when he'd come home with a stolen sheep, and his father laid into her with the stock whip, and she ran to him. And the axe had been there. If he hadn't fought with his father. If his father hadn't been drunk. If his father's woman hadn't put the blame on him. If he'd run instead of trying to stop the bleeding. If the mutton carcass hadn't been there.

If.

If he could get out of here, they'd never take him alive. Not in all his fifteen years had he been so afraid, so…imprisoned.

When they locked him up, he'd started to die.

He wanted to ask the new prisoner on their shackle line just how he thought it could be done. But not while they had a snitch with them. A snitch who'd just proved he would betray any one of them.

But there was another black man on the line. When Quint was asleep Lampy talked to him. He had to speak English. The man came from the far north.

“If he can break us out,” said one of the white prisoners, the shifty-looking bastard who stole his bread, “you boongs c'n count me in. They'll work us until we die here. Me and the rest of us, except that Quint. He rats on us, we'll kill him.”

Lampy had no trouble believing him.

Other men might have taken it out on the man who did this to them. Jack just stored it away. Knowing who would rat, who could be used to feed false information to the authorities, was also useful. But plainly it was terrifying the fellow next to him. The fink was obviously aiming for a place as a trusty. When the bread came around he whined about being threatened for trying to help the warders.

It didn't do him a whole lot of good, for reasons that became obvious a little later. The train stopped and they were herded and prodded off…to the reason that prisoners didn't come back from this trip.

It was not so much brutality, or murderous desire, but that the facts of this place must not leak out. It was brutal, of course. Some of the men hadn't even survived the trip, and the soldiers who took over herding the prisoners showed no mercy. One of the men in their cattle truck had lapsed into unconsciousness. The guards simply chopped his legs off and shot the bleeding, dying man. It provided a horrific lesson to the rest of the prisoners.

They had been taken to a military camp. A large military camp, heavily camouflaged. What was happening there was plain to Jack's eye, thanks to his experience in Ireland. This was a build-up of men and materiel for some kind of attack. It could only be on something in Westralia.

Jack had a good grasp of geography. But no one really knew just what lay in the vast deserts and semi-deserts of central Australia, besides heat that could kill a man. There were mines of great wealth there. Jack knew there was gold and iron to be had, just for a start.

It must be a prize worth a lot to the British Empire. There were, by his rough calculation, billets for maybe four thousand men in the camp. And there was a build-up in the marshaling yard they'd been disembarked at, trains and carriages, and, as he saw a little later, a fleet of trucks. The Hussars and Dragoons in their tropical undress kit intended to strike hard and fast, somewhere. They weren't colonial troops. These were elite men, out from England itself, sharpening up for an attack.

And somewhere soon.

The British Empire didn't care if prisoners died for no real reason or gain, but the British Army was a little less wasteful of its men, especially if it had shipped or flown them halfway around the world for this.

The reason they had begun taking any prisoners, and not just the few with death sentences, for the chain gangs, carrying sleepers and laying down track under the eyes of soldier-guards, was also quite obvious to Jack, within hours: They were pushing hard. Pushing to get to the last staging post before the vehicles could make their final stab across the desert.

Jack was no one's fool, except, at times, his own. In a way this meant the railway hard-labor gangs were no longer a work-until-you-die sentence. When they'd finished here, the British Army wouldn't care who knew about it anymore.

His fellow prisoners on the gang of seven, leg ironed together, didn't know that, though. All they saw was grueling work with little food, barely enough water, and other prisoners dying and being shot like dogs.

About a third of the prisoners were aboriginals or, like Quint, part aboriginal. They got it from both sides. The soldiers treated everyone badly, and them, if anything, worse. The white Australian
prisoners tended to take it out on them, too. The kid in their line was a youngster, barely more than a boy, who was even blacker than Quint, and he was having the worst time of it. Deloraine, who'd obviously been a thief, stole the kid's bread ration the first day. Jack gave the kid half of his, meager though it was. He couldn't watch the boy watch him eat, even if he knew he needed his own strength. The others noticed. And the next time there was none of that, although Jack was watching. Quint was again doing his best to kiss up to the guards, but there was little chance to do so. He might have been hoping for a soft job as a trusty. The rest had seen what was happening out there, and weren't wanting anything but away. Plainly, they talked among themselves. Jack was awakened by a quiet shaking from the next man along from Deloraine, a full-blood aboriginal man that no one messed with. “Irishman. You talk 'bout escape?”