Surviving Arkadia

I spent almost every hour of the next four days on the Plateau. I scavenged and foraged a fair bit but I spent much more time assessing the potential living spaces. Things weren’t looking good for Team Plateau. It absolutely would be possible to survive there, and even to overwinter, but only if you were a young fit adult or teenager with some pre-existing survival skills. In other words the sorts of people who can survive just about anywhere that people can survive.

Things were looking better for Team Train. We could fit about three quarters of the current Citadel population onto the train with relative ease. More if people were willing to bunk on the floor of some of the entertainment cars. There was plenty of space to store food and water and the train even had a device for harvesting moisture from the air to replenish its supplies. Always assuming that the experts could get it running.

And that was the big question. Could they get it running? The train was full of clever devices that would make life much more comfortable but many of them only worked if the train was moving and all of them required that the experts were able to get the engine functioning.

The device in the front of the train had a name that was beyond me. It was a long string of technical words like rotational and vortex. I wasn’t even sure if engine was the right word for it. From what I’d been able to ascertain it drew power directly from the source. The experts told me that it was unusual for such an old device to do that. It must have been in the first generation of large source powered techno-magical devices.

I tried to listen to the explanations from Asser Motram but I wasn’t convinced that he really understood how the thing worked. There were a couple of the boffins that seemed to know but they were unwilling to even try to explain it and they also didn’t want to make predictions about how long it would take to get it running. I sort of got the impression that they were ambivalent about the whole idea of getting it to do anything and would rather have studied it.

Nevertheless, as the days progressed I began to pick up on a certain excitement in their voices that suggested that they might be close to a method, or at least that they believed it was possible.

On the fourth day I walked in on an argument between Asser Motram, one of the artificers and one of the arcane scholars. It was, for want of a better word, the nerdiest thing I’d ever heard. For context I am including build optimisation arguments between MMORPG gamers. As a result I understood very little of the actual argument but I recognised how heated it was. I might not know what a vigorous excremen rodentia is but I know you shouldn’t get your degree from one.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” I said. “Such language is ill-suited to the gravity of the situation.”

They looked suitably chastened but also desperate to get back to the argument. I could feel the righteous academic rage boiling within each of them.

“Is there any way I can help, perhaps I can negotiate a ceasefire between you?”

“I think this might be a little too technical for a generalist like yourself,” said Jez Trattles, the Scholar.

“We really don’t have the time to spare for an explanation,” said Aubrey Hulland the Artificer.

“I think if you’ve got time to argue you’ve got time to explain,” I said. “And, as a great man once said, if you can’t explain something to a five-year old then you don’t truly understand it.”

“That’s half the problem,” said Scholar Trattles, “We don’t truly understand it.”

“I keep saying that it’s a fucking jet engine,” said Master Motram. “I understand it just fine.” He had indeed been saying it was ‘just a fucking jet engine’ which was why I’d been dubious that he understood it.

“So you say,” said Artificer Hulland, “And I believe you, I think we both believe you but if anything goes wrong during start-up it could strip the coating right off the blades and then it won’t work at all. Any damage to the blades is going to be nearly impossible to repair. I know there’s a bunch of replacement blades already made up but how confident are you about changing the blades, really?”

“I’m confident it’s possible. It looks like all the tools necessary are there. I believe that whoever designed this thing knew what they were doing and planned to make maintenance and repair as easy as possible. I’m just not confident about how much time it will take. Everything suggests that it’s ready to go now. I see no reason to waste precious time by taking it apart”

“There’s so much that we don’t understand about it,” said the Scholar. “Why is the reservoir so small? How did they get such a thin coating on the blades? Who discovered that you could even make paint from Ez radish, never mind that things painted with it would interact with Source winds? You realise that this is the earliest large Source fuelled device that we know about. This has to be at least 50 years earlier than we thought anyone was building source devices on this scale. We need to be studying it, not butchering it.”

“So if I understand your positions, Master Motram, you want to attempt to start it now? Artificer Hulland, you want to take the engine apart to ensure there’s no hidden damage and then put it back together before attempting to start it? Scholar Trattles, you think the train is too important as a historical artefact to use and that we should study it.”

They all nodded along as I spoke.

“That does seem to boil things down to their essentials,” said the Scholar.

“Then I see why you’re arguing with such vitriol. You’re all right.” They looked unhappy at that.

“We can’t all be right,” said the Artificer.

“The train is an important historical artefact and now that it’s been rediscovered we should preserve it. But realistically we probably can’t. As important as it is, it's not worth even a single life. Nobody should die because we chose to preserve it rather than use it. It absolutely makes sense to take the time to rebuild the engine before moving it, particularly since Master Motram actually knows how jet engines work. But what’s your contingency plan if the engine is still in pieces on a bench when the Ostians get here? And Master Motram, what’s your contingency plan if we get a few miles away with the Ostians on our heels and the engine suddenly grinds to a halt?”

“You know,” said Artificer Hulland after a long and uncomfortable silence of deep thought from the three of them, “there’s enough spare parts that we could build an entire second engine. That would prove that Master Motram knows how the engine works. Then if anything happens to the one that’s installed we just replace it with the new engine and work on that engine on the bench where we can see what we’re doing. Actually, now that I come to think about it, that might be why the maintenance bay in the train is so big.”

“Well?” I said.

“In all good conscience I cannot argue that any artefact is worth more than the lives it might save,” said the Scholar. “And I must confess that I am curious to document the complete assembly of the engine.”

“I believe that I could assemble a new engine,” said Asser Motram. “And it would be quicker to replace the entire engine than it would be to repair something finicky like a damaged blade. Particularly if the first fault caused other damage.”

The Scholar and the artificer left us and went to the maintenance bay, probably in a hurry to get started. When they were gone, Asser seemed to sag slightly.

“So it really is a jet engine then?” I said. I felt bad about doubting him.

“Specifically a jet turbine. It uses ambient source as both a fuel and in place of air in a traditional jet turbine. You know anything about jet engines?”

I braced myself for the discomfort of talking about my life before. “Not much, I only know anything at all because one of my favourite TV shows was ‘Air Crash Investigation’. I know more about what can go wrong with a jet engine than I do about how they work. How do you know so much?”

“I used to work on them,” he said. “I mostly worked on them outside of the plane, in a workshop. Why didn’t I think of building a second engine? It’s so obvious.”

“You were probably too focused on the ticking clock. I’ve noticed that us Outlanders always seem to be in a hurry compared to the natives. It’s like we’re always expecting something to go horribly wrong at any moment.”

That was the moment that the noise started. It was a terrible, grinding, groaning sound and it was coming from the direction of the Citadel.

“I would argue,” said Asser, “that we expect horrible things because they keep fucking happening.”