Vitrified Steel and High-Pressure Steam

The corrugated steel roof of Maintenance Bay Four groaned under twelve tons of shifting bulk before the first rivet sheared.

Damathea racked the heavy bolt of her anti-materiel rifle, the cold steel biting through her leather gloves. She stood on the narrow upper catwalk thirty feet above the concrete deck, tracking the buckling iron beams with her crosshairs. Below her, the massive boiler of Locomotive 404 hissed with building pressure, but the flexible stainless steel cryogenic feed lines still linked the tender's manifold to the station's storage tanks.

"Pelagia!" Damathea shouted over the rhythmic hammer of the ventilation compressors. "How much longer on that transfer?"

"Ninety seconds!" Pelagia's voice carried from the engine footplate, strained and breathless. "The secondary bleed valves are iced over! If I pull the couplers under full pressure, the backflow will shatter the tender's intake flange!"

Beside Pelagia, Kyriakos worked a bronze pry-bar against a frozen coupling collar, chips of white frost flying from the threads. In the cab, Stathios leaned out the side hatch, his hand braced on the twin injectors.

"Stoke the draft, Inspector!" Stathios barked down at Kyriakos. "We need three hundred pounds on the main boiler gauge before I can pop the cylinder cocks, or we stall on the depot threshold!"

A violent crash split the air above them.

The central skylight imploded in a shower of reinforced wire-glass and black sludge. A massive Tar-Stalker dropped through the opening, slamming onto the concrete apron between the locomotive and the storage battery. The creature did not have legs; it rolled forward on four undulating columns of dense, glistening pitch, its central maw venting a foul cloud of vaporized sulfur and unrefined crude.

The impact shook the entire catwalk. Damathea settled her boots against the iron grating, dropped to one knee, and aligned the crosshairs on the monster's forward sensory node, a pulsating cluster of translucent amber bladders embedded in the neck armor.

She squeezed the trigger.

The rifle bucked against her shoulder with a sharp bark. The tungsten-core round struck true, punching a clean hole through the amber node. Black fluid geysered from the wound, but the tar immediately flowed together, sealing the puncture in less than two seconds. The beast reared, its sensory stalks whipping toward the scent of gunsmoke on the catwalk.

Standard kinetic penetration was useless against self-sealing bulk. Damathea reached into her vest pocket, snapping a high-explosive incendiary cartridge into the chamber.

She did not aim at the beast's armored hide this time. Instead, her sight swept the bay's infrastructure. Directly above the deep mechanical inspection pit behind the monster ran an exposed three-inch hydraulic lift line, pulsing under four thousand pounds of pressurized mineral oil.

"Kyriakos! Clear the pit apron!" Damathea yelled.

Kyriakos threw himself backward against the locomotive's side skirts just as Damathea fired.

The incendiary slug sheared the hydraulic line in half. A high-velocity jet of pressurized hydraulic fluid erupted into the air, instantly catching the tracer's magnesium flare. A roaring curtain of fire cascaded into the forty-foot inspection pit, transforming the trench into an inferno.

The Tar-Stalker immediately turned toward the flame. Drawn by the sudden heat and the rich smell of burning light hydrocarbons, the beast surged away from Locomotive 404 and plunged its forward tendrils straight into the burning pit, gorging on the chemical fuel.

"Now, Pelagia!" Damathea called out, cycling the rifle bolt. "Drop the lines!"

On the footplate, Pelagia struck the emergency bypass lever with a heavy iron mallet. The pressure relief vents screamed, discharging a plume of white nitrogen vapor across the bay floor. The frost-locked coupling snapped free with a sharp metallic clang, the heavy reinforced hoses recoiling onto the concrete.

"Tender sealed!" Pelagia yelled, coughing through the freezing vapor. "Tanks are locked at full capacity!"

"Get aboard!" Stathios bellowed from the cab. "Brakes are off!"

The locomotive's massive drive wheels spun against the iron rails with a deafening shriek of sparks. Stathios opened the sanders, laying down grip against the grease-slicked deck. Locomotive 404 surged forward, its heavily armored tender now fully charged with liquid nitrogen.

Damathea did not take the catwalk stairs. As the armored cab rolled beneath her position, she swung over the safety railing, dropped ten feet, and landed hard on the reinforced steel roof of the tender. The impact sent a jolt up her shins, but she held fast to the welded grab-irons as the train accelerated.

Behind them, the Tar-Stalker in the inspection pit turned toward the shriek of the accelerating drive wheels. It hauled its tarry bulk from the flames, roaring with a wet, bubbling bellow, and lunged toward the rear steps of the tender.

Damathea drew a heavy fragmentation grenade from her combat harness, pulled the pin with her teeth, and rolled it directly into an open drum of degreasing solvent beside the track.

The blast detonated three seconds later, toppling a stack of six-hundred-pound axle assemblies across the rails behind the tender. The falling iron pinned the charging monster beneath two tons of solid steel, buying them the final yards they needed.

Up front, the armored prow of Locomotive 404 struck the depot's outer corrugated blast doors at twenty miles per hour. The sheet metal buckled, tore, and blew outward into the night.

Locomotive 404 burst through the industrial smog, roaring out onto the elevated high-line viaduct. Below them, the sprawling refineries of Halikarnas burned against the dark horizon, pillars of orange fire reflecting off rivers of crude oil flooding the switching ditches.

Damathea crawled forward along the roof walk, swung down through the cab hatch, and dropped onto the iron floorboards beside the roaring firebox.

Stathios stood at the throttle, his gaze fixed on the twin rails ahead. Pelagia was slumped against the tender bulkhead, wiping soot and grease from her safety goggles with trembling fingers.

"That'll be fifty guilders on the union tab for the hydraulic line," Damathea said, leaning her warm rifle against the tool rack. "And another twenty for the ammunition."

Stathios let out a dry, rasping cough that ended in a chuckle. "Send the invoice to the municipal auditor. If the city survives until morning, I'll sign the voucher myself."

At the opposite side of the cab, Kyriakos sat hunched over his Directorate telemetry receiver, the green cathode tube casting a sickly glow across his face. He had spliced the unit directly into the locomotive's cab signal repeater.

"We have a problem," Kyriakos said, not looking up.

Pelagia straightened, pushing her hair back from her forehead. "The nitrogen lines held. We have full tank pressure and the steam sprayers are primed."

"It isn't the tanks," Kyriakos replied, tapping the glass screen of the receiver. "Look at the track circuit for Junction Nine. The signal isn't red or green. It's dead."

Stathios frowned, his hand tightening on the brake handle. "The junction's automated. If the signal circuit drops dead, the pneumatic interlock defaults to the open bypass."

"It didn't drop by accident," Kyriakos said, looking at the yardmaster. "The Directorate monitor shows physical thermite slag across the turnout points. The cult didn't just steer the monsters into the refinery line. They welded the switches on the high-line to force us down the low freight loop straight toward the catalytic storage tanks."