Blameless(58)
The three of them dashed to the rail cabin. Floote overrode the driver’s objection to their presence by smashing in the front window with Alexia’s dispatch case, climbing inside, and punching the poor man hard in the jaw. He fell like a stone, and his stoker, a slight, reedy boy with wide, anxious eyes, meekly acquiesced to their demands.
No one else was on board.
Alexia ripped off her bustle fall, tore the length into strips, and handed them to Floote. He showed remarkable dexterity and mastery of knot work, trussing up the boy and his unconscious supervisor with ease.
“You do that quite efficiently, don’t you, Floote?” commented Alexia.
“Well, madam, being valet to Mr. Tarabotti had its advantages.”
“Genevieve, can you drive this contraption?” Alexia asked.
“I only worked on the initial schematics, but if you can stoke the boiler, I will figure it out.”
“Done!” Alexia thought stoking couldn’t be that difficult.
Soon enough, the effects of the magnetic disruption emitter wore off, and the massive steam engine in the center of the cabin rumbled back to life. The cabin was designed with a windowed steering area at either end so that the car did not itself turn around. Instead, the engineer merely shifted position in order to drive in the opposite direction.
Madame Lefoux, after a quick review of the controls, pulled down on a massive lever at one end of the lurching cabin and then dashed to the other end, pulling a similar lever up.
An alarmingly loud horn sounded, and the contraption, cabin, and massive hanging net of lumber down below began moving backward in the direction it had come, up the mountain once again.
Alexia let out a little cheer of encouragement.
Floote finished trussing up their two prisoners. “I do apologize, sirs,” he said to them in English, which they probably didn’t understand.
Alexia smiled to herself and kept stoking. Poor Floote, this whole escape was rather beneath his dignity.
Stoking was hot work, and Alexia was beginning to feel the strain of having dashed across rough terrain and then climbed a pylon. She was, as Ivy had once scornfully pointed out, a bit of a sporting young lady. But one would have to be positively Olympian to survive the past three days without some physical taxation. She supposed the infant-inconvenience might also have something to do with her exhaustion. But never having run while pregnant, she did not know quite who to blame—embryo or vampires.
Madame Lefoux was leaping about the end of the cable cabin, pulling levers and twisting dials maniacally, and the rail contraption lurched forward in response to her ministrations, moving from a sedate step-by-step crawl to a kind of swaying shambling run.
“Are you certain this thing can take this kind of speed with a load?” Alexia yelled from her self-prescribed stoker’s post.
“No!” Madame Lefoux hollered cheerfully back. “I am attempting to deduce how to set loose the cargo straps and net, but there seems to be a safety override preventing a drop while in motion. Give me a moment.”
Floote pointed out the front window. “I do not think we have that long, madam.”
Alexia and Madame Lefoux both looked up from what they were doing.
Madame Lefoux swore.
Another loaded cart was coming down the cables toward them. It was crawling along at a sedate pace, but it seemed to be looming very fast. While one cabin could climb over another, they were not designed to do so while still lugging a net full of lumber.
“Now would be a very good time to figure out a drop,” suggested Alexia.
Madame Lefoux looked frantically underneath the control board.
Alexia thought of a different tactic. She ran over to the other end of the cabin.
“How do I cut the cargo free?” she spoke in French and leaned close in to the frightened young stoker boy. “Quickly!”
The boy pointed in silent fear at a lever off to one side of the steam engine, separated from both sets of steering controls.
“I think I have it!” Alexia dove for the knob.
At the same time, Madame Lefoux began an even more frantic dance about the steering area, employing a complex series of dial-cycling and handle-pulling that Alexia could only assume would allow their cabin to climb over the other heading toward them.
They were close enough now that they could see the frightened gesticulations of the driver through the window of the other cable cabin.
Alexia pulled down on the freight-release lever with all her might.
The overrides screamed in protest.
Floote came over to help her, and together they managed to muscle it down.
Their rail car shuddered once, and seconds later they heard a loud crash and multiple thuds as the load of lumber fell down to the mountain below. Mere moments after that, there was a lurch as their cabin climbed its buglike way over the oncoming coach, swaying in a most alarming fashion from side to side, ending with one additional shudder as it settled back onto the rails on the other side.