Sea & Sky

Chapter 2-2

She felt kind of strange, going with him instead of attending class where he lectured at a big group of students.

The inside of the carriage consisted of little cabins with cloth-covered seats and little tables in between them. Further down the carriage was a narrow corridor with sleeping cabins on either side. Viki checked the numbers on the doors.

“This is yours.”

Lana looked in. The cabin was tiny and mostly taken up by a bunk bed. She put her overnight bag on a shelf to the side, underneath the tiny window. The only thing she could see from the window was the red side of another train, with dark streaks where raindrops had run across the paint.

“Is everything all right?” Viki asked from the door.

“It’s cute. Will anyone use the top bunk?”

“No. This is just for you. My cabin is next-door.”

He stepped into the cabin and put a cloth parcel on the bottom bunk. “Put that in your overnight bag.”

Lana picked up the parcel. “What is it?”

“Sonorics suit.”

She frowned at him. “Why would we need it?”

“You read that comment about dust devils, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did, but . . .” She looked from the suit to him. She remembered her father talking about the machines that the Aranians might have made.

“Several of our barygraphs have been recording sonorics spikes near Ysherra. I’d rather lug these suits around and not need them than need them and not have them.”

That was true, but still . . . sonorics? “Where would it be coming from? I thought sonorics was made by that machine under the City of Glass.”

“That’s what we all thought. And it was made by that machine, but there may be other machines.”

“Near Ysherra?”

“We don’t know.” He was silent for a while and an expression of worry came over his face. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

Lana put the parcel on top of her bag since it wouldn’t fit inside. She was pretty sure she didn’t need to be as careful with sonorics as other people. Her mother was from the City of Glass and all Perians had a very high resistance to sonorics. Lana would have inherited at least some resistance from her mother.

“Let’s find our seats,” Viki said.

They went back to the section of the carriage with the little cabins. Viki was checking his ticket to find the number that corresponded with the number on the little round label affixed to the cabin door.

Their seats were in the third cabin from the back.

Lana sat next to the window, and Viki settled opposite her, with the table in between them. Through the cabin’s glass door, she could see a lot of activity still on the platform, if not in this particular carriage.

Most of the passengers went into the carriages at the end, which had only seats. Lana asked where those people slept, and Viki said they slept mostly in their seats, or didn’t sleep at all.

“We get free first class travel for the doga, because otherwise a lot of representatives would never go home and never talk to their people about the things that the doga is proposing.”

That made sense.

Lana eyed the empty seats. “Anyone else coming in here?”

“Only when it’s busy.”

And the trains to the north were never busy, Lana had heard. It was the main reason that the railway had never been extended, even though her father had promised it years ago.

They sat down and waited.

“I hope your family won’t miss you too much,” Lana asked after a slightly awkward silence.

He smiled. “There is so much noise in my house that they may not notice I’m gone.”

Viki had no less than ten children.

Eventually, people stopped coming onto the train. Some station guards walked past, one with a flag. The clouds of steam became thicker.

Men’s voices rang out on the platform. Someone yelled, “Make it quick. Train’s about to leave.”

A door opened in the carriage and a number of talking and laughing men climbed in. Their heavy boots clonked on the floor and the carriage moved with their weight. There were a lot of them, and they came through the corridor past the cabin where Lana and Viki sat, a line of big, sturdy men silhouetted against the light.

A horn tooted on the platform, the engine hissed and clanked and chugged.

Very slowly, the train moved away from the station. A couple of men stood outside the cabin door. Someone called out further down the corridor.

Viki flicked his eyebrows. “Soldiers.”

The train was going through the commercial part of the city, where the windows gave a view into the back yards stacked with crates and other rubbish. Then they went through a part of town where people lived in apartments four or five floors high. There was a fence along the tracks, and weeds grew along it. They crossed the iron bridge over the river with the sound of metal on metal that Lana could sometimes hear at night when the window in her bedroom was open. On the other side of the river the track crossed an area of small farms with little fields where farmers grew vegetables and flowers. The tracks turned, giving Lana a splendid view of Tiverius. The golden light of dusk reflected off the dome of the doga assembly building, where her father would be standing at his dais. To the right was the gently sloping part of town where the well-off families lived, where her mother would sit in the kitchen with Myra and maybe Myra’s husband Farius. The Scriptorium’s tower stuck out above the tiled roofs of the merchant quarter.

“Excuse me, sir?”

The door to the cabin had opened and a military officer looked in—quite a high-ranking one, judging by the stars on the band around his upper arm.

He nodded at the empty seats. “Is anyone using those seats, sir?”

“No, we’re not,” Viki said. He had brought a book to read, and he moved it from the seat next to him to the table.

The door opened further and four men came in. All were in military uniform: sandy brown trousers and shirt; a broad leather belt with a dagger, all-purpose tool, water bottle and pouch; heavy high boots of brown leather; and a blue beret.

Clean-shaven and well-groomed, they looked quite similar, although one wore a row of gold stars on his chest. He was ranked much higher than the others. They sat in the remaining seats in the cabin.

The high-ranking man sat next to Viki. The man next to Lana was much younger, maybe only a few years older than she. In addition to the dagger, he also carried a gun, which he took off and placed in the luggage rack above his head.

He sat down again, nodding to Lana. “M’lady. It’s not appropriate to carry weapons in the presence of a woman and a senator.”

His face was so serious that Lana almost burst out laughing. M’lady? Was this guy for real?

“I wasn’t aware that the military used civilian trains,” Viki said.

The high-ranking officer said, “We don’t normally, but we were told to go to Watya, and there were no trucks available.”

“I’m guessing with the balloon division, you don’t normally use trucks anyway.”

“That’s correct, sir. I believe you’re Senator han Marossi?”

“I am indeed. This is my student, Lana han Chevonian.”

He bowed to Lana. “We’re pleased to meet someone as distinguished as our proctor’s daughter. I’m Patrol Commander Ramatius and these are my junior officers Jarendran, Daferius and Yaishan.”

The officer next to Lana nodded again. She thought he was Yaishan. What sort of name was that? Regional, for sure. His skin appeared darker than that of the others, and he was taller and broader.

His eyes had an unnervingly honest look that made her turn away.

The train was going through the forest now. It was getting dark and there was little to see except a wall of increasingly dark trees whizzing past the window.

A railway attendant came to each cabin to light the lamps with a flame on a long stick and a bottle with a narrow spout to refill the oil basins.

Viki and the commander had moved to talking about balloons. All four men wore a little medallion on their uniforms that, when the light fell on it a certain way, showed a group of flying swans, which Lana guessed to be the balloon division’s emblem.

Yaishan, next to her, leaned back in his seat, glancing at the couple of soldiers in the corridor, who didn’t appear to have found seats.

“How many of you are on this train?” Lana asked in a low voice.

“Our unit is forty-eight strong.”

“Do you fly balloons?”

“Yes. Each vessel has twelve crew.”

“I would love to fly on a balloon one day.” Another thing that her father would never allow her to do. “Why don’t you fly to Watya?”

“Too slow. A balloon is a tactical combat vehicle, not a transport vehicle.”

“But balloons do fly long distances?”

“They can. But very slowly. And they’re highly sensitive to the wind directions. I guess you know all about the wind as meteorology student.” He was very serious.

He sounded a bit like that arrogant boor Pavin from her astronomy group, but Lana wasn’t sure that was such a good comparison. She didn’t think he was like Pavin.

“Have you ever been to Watya before?”

Now a ghost of a smile played over his face. “I was born in Watya and grew up there.”

The train rumbled on into the darkness. Yaishan told Lana about Watya, and then Viki suggested they get something to eat. The six of them moved to the dining car, past the other cabins in front of theirs, out a little door across a walkway between two carriages, where the cool night air made Lana shiver, and into the warmth of the dining car. Dinner was a piece of steamed duck with sour cabbage and raisins and cooked barley. It was a very traditional Chevakian meal such as she only got when she went home with her friends. Myra came from the City of Glass and cooked more modern meals.

Lana sat opposite Viki on the long table. It was noisy in the car with the talk and laughter of all the soldiers and, on the far end, all the second-class passengers waiting for their turn to eat.

“Did you ever hear anything back from Javes?” Lana asked Viki.

“Apart from the reports he sent, no.”

“It’s very strange. He wrote me a letter asking for some information about Dust Devils. I wrote back to him, but he never replied. I’m not even sure that he got my letter.”

“He might not have received it. Communication isn’t the best.”

“Wouldn’t it be just the mail, like we get in Tiverius, or that we send to Twin Bridges or Solmeni?”

“Yes, except a lot of people travel to those places, and there is quite a lot of mail. Only a few people live in Ysherra, and those that do are not interested in sending anything to Tiverius. So it takes a long time for the mail office to collect enough mail to be worth sending.”

Oh. “What about the telegraph line?” There was one, because Javes had used it. She had learned that meteorological field stations were in all places where there was a telegraph line so that weather data could be sent to Tiverius.

“It’s only a single line, and it’s very sensitive to bad weather. It goes out for days on end.”

So maybe he hadn’t even received her information. That was annoying. Maybe he thought she was thumbing her nose at him. “Does he know that we’re coming?”

“No. I’ve heard nothing from him for a while. I presume he’s busy making the rounds of the weather stations. He also had a lot of trouble after his tutor died. The town wants him to stay there, but I wouldn’t send an inexperienced meteorologist to Ysherra. That’s why I sent him to Pashtan, because he’s very experienced.”