This is the second chapter of The Highline. The first chapter can be found at the link below. This is a fiction/science-fiction novel that I’ve been working on for a while. I’d like to emphasize that the material I have thus far produced has been produced for free. I respect your time by not using AI to create slop, and would hope you’ll respect mine by purchasing a subscription for $6 a month. I hope you enjoy the continuation of the story.
“Skip-gap” that was the name that’d been given to this sensation. Adamus floated momentarily in the nothing: a void of self. An odd name, but far easier to use than the mouthful Dominion scientists liked: “semi-finite discontinuous alignment transfer.” That mess of syllabus wasn’t entirely by accident; it had been selected precisely because a mouthful of words that big discouraged people from thinking about it too much. So the technical merits of the phenomena were often overlooked for a more material view in the public eye. The skip-gap. The simple momentary discomfort experienced when passing from one world to the next.
“Skip-gap” described the feeling of the transfer, like a bit of time and space had been sliced out; the body requiring a few minutes to catch up again. For most, it passed as disorientation, blurred vision, maybe some tremors in the hands and difficulty in focusing for a few minutes. Adamus, however, was a Navigator. He fell into the no-place with familiarity as space and time became mushy and ran at the edges like wet paint. At an intellectual level, he knew where he was, but at the physical level, he felt nothing. Not even pain from the knife through his hand. A mind submerging in the drift.
It was clever to attack a Navigator right before a train went through. That’d be your best shot. The target would be distracted by the void, gossamer-thin curtains of reality drawn apart before the plunge. Clever, but risky. Adamus tried to evaluate his physical position based on memory alone.
He was on top of the kid, right leg splayed out and left hand forward. Left knee up. There was a knife through his right hand, grinding against bone. His right leg had been stabbed, too. He tried to remember where, the thigh, he thought. Outside. The femoral artery wasn’t damaged, probably. Those injuries would take a while to heal, but weren’t disabling. He tried not to let himself get distracted. Focus. He had to focus. He could sense he was already intellectually lingering in the void for too long.
What even was time here?
No. Focus.
After the skip-gap, the kid could probably take a few seconds to recover.
Can I get hold of the injector by then? Maybe.
I’ll have to rip that knife out of my right hand; that’ll hurt. Is the injector nonlethal?
He decided that it didn’t matter. The kid definitely wasn’t friendly.
Friendly is an odd-sounding word when you think about it…
Right hand, right thigh, roll left. Ok, ok. Focus. Go.
On the far side of the gate, Adamus found his mind shunted back into its corporeal form. Pain hit him again while the kid under him shivered momentarily. Adamus recovered quickly. He was trained for this. He yanked his right hand up and felt the blade snag on something as it sliced through already bloody flesh. His partner in the coat rolled on the floor, trying to regain his senses. Though bleary, Adamus had already rolled to the left and grabbed the little handheld injector. He moved fast as the kid attempted to catch up lethargically. The kid succeeded in pushing Adamus over, but it was too late. He had the injector. He shoved it into the kid’s neck and pulled the trigger, hoping not to receive another wound for the trouble.
Adamus exhaled with relief as the kid flopped a few times before his eyes rolled up and he lay still. The kid’s left arm, which had been in the midst of a lazy rise to strike, slowed. The knife fell from his hand and landed on Adamus’ bicep point first.
“Dammit!” The knife clattered to the ground after leaving him with a third, albeit minor, wound.
Three injuries in as many seconds. The little chucklefuck was persistent. Few people, even experienced operators, would be that capable of action out from a gate. Adamus tried to stand and nearly toppled over, remembering that his thigh, too, had been wounded. He gritted his teeth and stood more carefully, leaving drops of blood across the door from the open wound in his right hand.
A voice rang out across the intercom system. “We have now entered Subsector Cicada, Stratum Highlonus, Substratum Kisarick, Terrestrum Monida. We are roughly one hour from the next Port Authority depot.”
Outside, the environment had shifted from the outskirts of a concrete city to a vast sea of trees with white blossoms. The epilocomotive tore along steel rails as the setting sun lit white flowers like fireflies in the wilderness. Adamus’ hands shook, and he’d gone pale from the adrenaline of the fight. His wounds hurt. A mark of survival. A red smear denoted his passage down the central walkway as he sought out help.
…
Adamus Ortega Cassius attempted to sign his name with his left, uninjured, hand. The papers were formal documentation recounting the recent attack, and the story wasn’t particularly long. He punctuated his poor penmanship. “Alright, that’s everything.” The epilocomotive clerk smiled and left. He watched her plump rear disappear into the hall.
“Ow!” Adamus exclaimed. The physician pricked his palm with a suture needle.
From his position on a medical bed, Adamus could see the platform through a window. A sign hanging just outside read Terrestrum Monida – SilverStrike District. Adamus could also see a Sheriff and a deputy speaking to Security personnel. Artificial lights lit as the sun sagged to twilight behind thick trees. This was a settled-agricultural world, a stop over for raw goods. Despite the commotion surrounding a violent attack on the train, the Marching Duck still had a schedule to keep. If they fell too far behind, the Epilocomotive could lose its Transit Mandate.
While Adamus received wound dressing, the Conductor had asked his security chief to handle any potential problems. Fortunately for Adamus, the Epilocomotive medical bay had proved sufficient for his injuries. They had a few pain killers, gauze, and a medical officer, who’d elected to wait until the train had stopped to begin suturing wounds.
That had taken the better part of an hour. The rail line snaked through coastal hills before arriving at the SilverStrike depot. Conflagration points weren’t regular occurrences; their seemingly random spacing, dozens or hundreds of miles apart, added to the already confusing complexity of the rail line maps. It wasn’t uncommon for rail lines to snake back around on themselves from one world to the next. The Penrose had a sense of humor, it seemed, and just like lightning, folklore stated that no conflagration points anywhere in the dominion were ever in the same place twice.
Adamus glanced at a handcuff holding him to the medical bed. Once he’d found help, everyone had been restrained. The kid who’d stabbed him was still coldly unconscious just three beds over.
Adamus looked back from the window. “So you know what Security is planning to do with all this?”
The physician shook his head. “Not really. Hold still. I’d heard there’s been trouble before at the 07-21 junction. Didn’t expect it to happen when we passed through, though. Mostly just superstition.”
“A superstition.” Repeated Adamus. “This train have its own navigator onboard?” In his experience, those silly superstitions often originated from people like himself. Those that’s gone a little too far looking into the void and thought they could hear something on the other side. All nonsense, of course, until they were needed; hooked up to a harness and asked to peer across and make sure the far side was a safe LZ. Then their visions were treated as gospel.
The Physician, whose name was Carlyle, according to the “Chief Medical Officer” name tag, shook his head. “We haven’t got a navigator right now, we’re not really a frontier train, so we usually don’t need one. Monida is just a stop-through for us. Right on the edge of Cicada Subsector. The next real tarrestrum is Civis.”
It took another hour and a half before a few Deputies came in and rolled Adamus’ attacker out on a gurney. Still unconscious. Adamus did bother to check and see if the kid was breathing. He was. When that little shit woke up, there’d be some explaining to do thought Adamus angrily.
Over the next twenty minutes, Carlyle finished laying sutures. One of the nurses, Amanda, handed Adamus a bottle of antibiotics while Carlyle spoke. “We don’t know if that knife was clean, and there can be weird bacterial cross-contamination on the rail lines. These should probably take care of any issues you might have. Take one every day for the next ten days.”
When the SilverStrike sheriff appeared to take a statement in person, Adamus was already chafing to leave. Adamus and the Sheriff exchanged guarded pleasantries. Neither of them wanted to be there. The Sheriff was supposed to have gotten home to his apartment half an hour ago, but here he was taking statements.
The Sheriff was a bigger man with a strong jaw. He stood with the poise of a fighter, something that Adamus recognized. The man had broken up more than a few fights across SilverStrike, but rarely got involved with the Port Authority if he could avoid it. The Port Authority depot was the economic cord that tied his little mining settlement to the rest of the dominion. The mine loaded her up with ore, while Agricultural goods were shipped here over the hills by short rail or truck. As long as the mine execs were happy, he was left to his own devices. His little community away from the bizarre technical machinations of the Dominion. The man’s chief worry is that one day his carefully balanced community would come crashing down if something drew the ire of an errant Council Bureaucrat. This particular scuffle wasn’t his problem, though. In theory, all he had to do was keep the peace while the Port Authority sorted itself out. The less he could get involved, the better.
“My name is Sheriff Blake Tannis,” Adamus noted an accent. Harder vowels. An evident linguistic drift away from Dominion standard.
“I’ve already given a statement to the locomotive clerk. Can’t you get a copy from her?” Asked Adamus.
The Sheriff shook his head. and removed a magnetic tape recorder from his breast pocket and clicked the record button. “We’ll need our own copy.”
Adamus exhaled with irritation. “Yes, sir.”
One of the deputies entered the room and greeted the men and the nurse. The two lawmen wore uniforms that were rough at the edges.
“So where do you want to start?” Asked Adamus.
…
Adamus retold events as he understood them. Emphasizing that he had no idea who his attacker was, and no reason to fight the dipshit in the first place. Also emphasizing his Veteran’s Rail Pass. He still had nearly a year on the thing, and he was completely within his right to use it as he pleased: go see whatever parts of The Penrose he could get to in that time.
There were three primary perks of joining up with the Autonomous Combat Forces, the first was the ACF enlistment stake, though that was a crap shoot. More a matter of luck, depending on whether you’d gotten a stake on land near a prospected mine or oil site or just some chunk of wilderness that an exec. wanted to turn into a pasture. Then there was also basic medical, of course. The third perk was the Golden Ticket, as they called it. The Veteran’s Rail Pass… Thirteen months after you got out, travel along the Port Authority Network Rail was free. He could see the whole Penrose, go upstream to an apex world or downstream and become a prospector. Whatever he wanted.
That particular piece of paper is what Adamus waved in front of Sheriff Tannis. “I absolutely have a right to be wherever I want. You can check it if you like. I have no idea who this dude who came at me was, but I doubt he’s even got papers.”
“There’ll be a full investigation,” Tannis said formally. He was accustomed to dealing with belligerent drunks. An ornery veteran wasn’t too bad by comparison.
“Real quick, you say you injected your attacker with something?”
“Listen, man, I don’t know what it was, he came at me and I got the better of him,” Adamus said.
“We have a doctor on site, but until we know what you injected him with, they’re hesitant to try waking him up. We don’t have the fancy medical instruments here that you’re probably used to. Says here you were an officer? Retired early?”
Adamus wasn’t in the mood to be interrogated for a second time. “I was a lieutenant on a class C Behemoth, the Excelsior Dawn.”
“And your MOS?”
Adamus grumbled. “Man, that thug attacked me. I didn’t jump him and sure as shit didn’t have a reason to. I just got out. I take no responsibility for this mess. You think that I did something?”
“No, Adamus, we don’t think that you assailed that man. More to the point, on the excelsior dawn, were you a navigator?”
Adamus cocked his head and lifted his sleeve to display the MOS tattoo. “Yes. I didn’t mention that earlier. Why do you ask?”
Sheriff Tannis winced momentarily with discomfort and lied, “I was just guessing.”
“You think it was a robbery?” Adamus asked, “I’m not that obviously just out of the service, am I?”
“Pretty obviously not from around these parts.” The Deputy said quietly.
“I’ve got some more questions for you before I answer yours,” Tannis said.
Adamus glared at the ceiling like he was trying to bore a hole up to the second floor of the rail car. “Alright, what else do you want to know?”
…
Fifteen minutes later, Sheriff Tannis brooded over the wording of a priority message. He finally tapped “send” on the mechanical keyboard and fired the missive across a recently installed transcontinental telecomms cable. Little lights blinked at a relay center. There was a small port city about two hundred and fifty miles south of SilverStrike, another Port Authority depot. Fifty miles south of that was a network rail gateway with a conflagration alignment due in a few hours. The next epilocomotive carried the message onboard, transcribed from electronic beeps to a magnetic tape deck. That’s how communication was handled within the dominion, one train at a time, one alignment at a time.
When the epilocomotive passed through the skip-gap to terrestrum Civis, the message was transcribed and connected to another rail line on the southern continent via satellite, where it would be relayed again. The transmission crisscrossed eleven worlds over the course of fifty-nine hours. Each time carried by one of the hulking diesel engines in a massive data-storage bank. Each time it had to be reconstructed, retransmitted, and retrnascribed along the most time-efficient route.
The Port Authority used magnetic tape as the preferred storage medium due to data instability during skip-gap exposure. Overly compressed information or equipment, low-entropy data systems like microchips and circuits in particular, corrupted or failed during transit. Thus, the arduous, if automated, task of repeatedly converting information from a low-resolution magnetic medium to electrical and back. Over and over, the message cycled between substrates. When it finally arrived at its destination, it was reconstructed, decrypted, and automatically prioritized. It appeared in the regional council investigation team's email folder with a priority notification.
…
Council Investigators, and Quaesitors Evyline and Otto
Last autumn, I was told in no uncertain terms to report additional disappearances or incidents that occurred along the Network Rail 07-21 junction. Particularly those that involve current or veteran navigators. I recall telling you that no prospecting teams remained in Tarrestrum Monida, from which one might vanish. While that remains true, a recent incident on the Network Rail involving the locomotive The Marching Duck may be of interest.
A veteran of the Highline war was evidently a passenger on the Marching Duck. He reports an assault by an individual now in custody. The victim’s name is Adamus Ortega Cassius. It appears he was targeted with some type of neurotoxin we’re yet to identify. Though, as the attack concluded with the attacker receiving a dosage of the drug, we do know that it renders the victim unconscious for an extended duration. We don’t know how long the effects will last, but we intend to interrogate the attacker once he wakes up, if he wakes up. The attacker had no identifiable effects. He did have with him a pair of falsified rail passes for the Vicarus 10-07 and the Cicada 10-21. I doubt the fakes would stand up to scrutiny in a circuit city, but they were effective enough out here.
While Adamus Cassius suffered several stab wounds, he is on his feet and will probably make a full recovery in a week or two. As we have a frontier legal code, Adamus Cassius has not been arrested, as he would have been well within his rights to simply shoot his attacker and be done with it. At the time, he was unarmed. The Conductor of the Marching Duck got on his way roughly twenty minutes behind schedule after everything was sorted. The Port Authority commandant has requested access to all materials pertinent to this investigation. I will be proceeding with a standard investigation and interrogation of the suspect.
~Sheriff Blake Tannis,
SilverStrike District,
N. Anca, Ordainus-Γ
Terrestrum Monida, Substratum Leeds, Stratum Highlonus, Subsector Cicada
…
Upon receiving and reading the message, quaesitor Otto responded as quickly as he could. He knew full well that any response would take days to arrive. He just hoped that nothing would get screwed up in that time. His experiences with Sheriff Tannis the year prior had been relatively positive, and the Dominion systems were prioritizing this specific investigation with good reason. While he would usually send a few of his investigators, this message was given priority for a reason. This might be the break he needed. He just needed Tannis to hold everything in place for a week until he arrived. Maybe a little longer, depending on a favorable travel route.
By the time Otto had exited his apartment, his HUD-intelligence was already making arrangements for requisitioned resources, travel tickets, and sending a message to the subsector oversight committee warning them of a probable extended absence. There was a lot that would need to be done before he left. Fortunately for him, most of those tasks had already begun, pending his personal authorization. Digital orders and information flitted away from him at the speed of light. Automated vehicles whizzed past through LED-lit streets. Civilians, noses mostly buried in phones or using HUD screens of their own, wandered past in a haze of data and information. Quaesitor Otto had a train to catch.
…
“Listen, man, this is just a through stop for me,” Adamus said irritably.
“Stick around and see the sights. Just until our friend in the cell wakes up.” Said Sheriff Tannis.
“Am I under arrest?” Asked Adamus.
Tannis sighed. Adamus had rejected help walking out on the platform and was stepping with a pronounced limp. The knife had gone all the way through the muscle in his leg. Fortunately, it’d only been about an inch and a half wide. The tissue damage, however, was deep. Adamus suspected there was a little notch in his femur that’d been left behind, but didn’t want to complain. In a week or two, it would heal up.
Worse, he was now caught up in this whole investigation. He’d just gotten out and didn’t want to get yanked back into some new adventure for the Dominion. Adamus looked at Tannis and then over at the Port Authority Commandant and then the Deputy. “If I’m not under arrest, I can just leave.”
“It is an obvious case of self-defense.” Said the Deputy. The name on his badge was Teri Levant. He’d worked with Sheriff Tannis for quite a while and knew how little Tannis wanted SilverStrike to get run over by something up-chain. Last summer, a queasitor had shown up asking all sorts of weird questions they didn’t have the answers to. It’d be easier to just arrest Adamus. At the same time, Teri believed in the principles of frontier law. He’d grown up in SilverStrike, gone off to enforcer school up in a circuit city, and chosen to come back. He liked it here, where life was a bit slower and simpler. He liked the law where a man’s right to defend himself; something a lot of the fellas from the mine, his friends, held sacrosanct in every bar brawl.
Sheriff Tannis spoke after a long pause. “No… you’re not under arrest. I would arrest you if I could. I’d still like you to stay in town through the whole investigation, though. Whatever it turns up, we might need you here.”
Adamus glanced over at the platform as the deep horn of the Marching Duck sounded and the Epilocomotive began to pull away. It was laden with agricultural goods and mineral concentrate from the mine. Massive head frames dotted the hills behind the train. SilverStrike by land area was about evenly split between the mine and metallurgy plant, the massive Port Authority depot, and the actual town itself; the residential and commercial blocks, squeezed around narrow overpopulated streets beneath sodium-vapor lanterns. Brick and wood bunkhouses dominated the outskirts. Beyond the city limits: wooded wilderness. Adamus thought about the fact that he could always just catch another train out of here. “Well, if you’re not arresting me…”
The Port Authority Commandant spoke authoritatively, a mannerism that ill suited his pudgy frame. “By the order of the Port Authority, I’m suspending you from the 10-21 Cicada Network Rail until this matter is sorted.”
“Alright, damn.” Said Adamus.
The commandant glared at Sheriff Tannis. “Now, all of you can get this matter sorted and off my platform. I expect to be made aware of any and all developments.”
Sheriff Tannis looked somewhere between relieved and exasperated. “Alright, I’ll let you know when the perpetrator wakes up. Then we’ll see if we want to try him locally or if you guys want to handle him upstream.”
The Sheriff and the Commandant didn’t exactly have a friendly relationship. It wasn’t open hostility either. Both of them would make regular shows of disagreement. In this case, it was technically a matter that could have been fully handled in-house by the Port Authority, but the commandant didn’t have the resources at this rural port to manage prisoners or investigations. The Marching Duck could have handled it, but the conductor had a schedule to keep. On the rare occasion something occurred on a train, the Conductor always had the option to pass the problem to the Port Authority operating the station.
The result was an investigation that no one wanted to handle, and which ended up falling on the shoulders of Sheriff Tannis, who had no witnesses, no evidence beyond a knife and an empty injector, and no one to interview. At least he could question and imprison the attacker, so it would ultimately look like a win, just not a significant one in comparison to the amount of work it incurred.
“Well, I guess you could show me around, then,” Adamus said. “Like an inn or something. I’m tired and wounded.”
“You could stay at the station,” suggested Deputy Levant.
Adamus rolled his eyes. “Show me somewhere nicer than that.”
“Keep an eye on him.” Said Tannis guardedly.
The three of them had stepped off the platform and onto the main street of SilverStrike. A broad paved boulevard with narrow cobblestone roads splaying off into dense, if somewhat primitive, construction. Even at this late hour, there was a perpetual rumble of small internal combustion engines and the smell of exhaust as business owners and workers bustled to and fro. “Where do you think I’m going to go?” Adamus asked.
Tannis pointed at Deputy Levant, “For his protection, keep an eye on him. There’s a chance this wasn’t an isolated incident. Call it a protection detail.”
Adamus snorted.
“Come on, old timer.” Said Levant, “I’ll give you a lift to the Miners Inn.”
“Good,” said Sheriff Tannis as if to conclude the entire affair. “I’ve got some messages to send.”
Despite many of the differences between worlds, most of the vehicles were somewhat standardized. There were only a few dozen large companies that mass-produced civilian vehicles across millions of individual factories. The sheriff’s office here had older model cars, but not that old. Adamus scooted into the seat and sat down. If he wasn’t under arrest, he was free to go. That’s how it worked, and why would he want to stick around for a wild goose chase? He watched brick buildings trundle past beneath orange street lights. He was tired and needed to lie down. It felt like the world was trying to draw him back into it. That’s why he didn’t want to reenlist. He wanted out, to be his own man, not sit in the back of either an APC or a police cruiser. That sheriff, Tannis, was crazy if he thought Adamus was just going to hang up his hat and sit and wait like a good little soldier for the next week or two.
The whole Penrose wanted to close in and swallow him. Like artillery shells over trenches or a reactor breach in a behemoth. He wasn’t about to get locked down for the convenience of the Port Authority, or the ACF, or anyone else. He was done. Out. While bathing, he considered his options and made plans on how best to make a quiet exit.
This actually surprised me with how good it is. I don't normally like Sci-Fi, but I'm genuinely liking it. I liked the knife fight at the start and the toxin angle, can't wait for Chapter 3!