Railroad: Part 4
Lola finds out what's really inside the missing containers
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: Detective Lola Styles is investigating a new case of disappearing cargo, which has been vanishing while transiting through the portal to London. Having spotted anomalies in the shipping logs, she’s now opening up the suspicious containers before they transit through the portal…
Bruglia.
3202. Leafless.
It was a series of feints and distractions, a magician’s catalogue of tricks and illusions. There were duplicate containers under the same cargo ID, with the log entries not quite corresponding. The sort of thing that would be easily noted by a computerised system, but be overlooked by a person. The physical ID numbers on the sides of many of the Barrindon containers were enhanced with simple visualist illusions, designed to wear off after a specified amount of time: on the Bruglia side of the portal all would be as expected, while on the London side the identifier would have changed. Hence the vanishing containers - the containers were disguising themselves as different shipment mid-transit. The only real tell was that they were borrowing the old Barrindon routes, which were supposed to be shut down.
None of it would have shown up without the portal delays, which had given Sergeant Raelar sufficient time to notice some of the anomalies - even if his imagination had proven to be even more over-active than Lola’s.
They’d already checked three of the suspect containers, which were scattered through the cargo dock, finding nothing but empty space or packing materials with no actual inventory. Which was suspicious by itself. There was one more container to find, which turned out to be almost at the front of the slowly-moving queue. Another few hours and it would have been on its way through the portal.
“Let’s hope there’s something interesting here,” said Raelar, “otherwise someone has been spending a lot of money to waste our time and confuse the system. There’s cheaper ways to do that than paying to send empty shipments through the portal.” He fiddled with the lock sequence, then pulled the heavy metal handle that released the doors.
An empty space echoed back at them.
Raelar banged his fist on the door. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the guys back at the garrison had set this up somehow as a joke at my expense.”
Lola stepped into the container. It was warmer inside than she might expect, certainly more so than the previous interiors they’d checked. There was nothing noticeably different about this container, and if anything it was more bare than the others. She moved further in and ran her hand along the corrugated metal wall. Kaminski had got himself stuck inside one of these once, trapped with a piece of a prototype AI megaship. She smiled to herself: it wasn’t a sentence she would have ever expected to think. It was a weird job. She took another step and her foot bumped something which almost caused her to stumble and fall. Looking down, there was nothing there: she must have tripped over her own feet.
She was about to leave and rejoin Raelar when her fingers brushed past something soft. It felt like strands of hair, but there was nothing there. Reaching out, she waved her hands in front of her, feeling more than a little silly. Taking a step forward, confused, she stretched her arm again and clearly felt a physical object react beneath her fingertips. It was soft, fleshy, and was only there for a moment before disappearing. A phantom sensation, prompting her mind to leap to conclusions. A ghost? A creature escaped from the void between the portals? An invisible tear in reality? An invisible Palinese creature she’d not encountered before?
Occam’s Razor. Tellor’s Paradigm. Keep it simple, Styles.
She knew what it was.
“I know you’re there,” she said, taking a step back. “I’m unarmed. I mean you no harm, but there’s no point continuing to hide.”
Raelar entered the container. “Who are you talking to?”
There was a pause, the only noise that of machinery outside in the dock. Then the air rippled and the empty interior of the container peeled away to reveal at least twenty people huddled together, pressed into the far end of the container, a mix of human, aen’fa and koth, all of them tired and scared and with the old clothes on their backs their only possessions. There was a chest strapped to one wall. There was a collective wail as the camouflage illusion dropped, the visualist responsible standing before the group with his hand still outstretched.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not turning to look at the others.
There were old and young, male and female. All of them looking desperate. A refugee group, most likely, trying to make an illegal crossing to Mid-Earth and supposed safety. Lola had spent most of her life trying to get to Palinor, but she’d become all too aware of the reasons for others to leave. Her fantastic dream was more of a nightmare for many of those born to the world.
She’d also encountered this kind of illegal migration before, the routes being mostly operated by professional underground traffickers. While the refugees would pay for transit, hoping for a better future, their escorts would instead sell them into slavery or the sex industry upon arrival in London. They had no papers, no protections. It was do as they were told or be sent back home. None of these people had any good choices to make. They’d almost made it through the portal to whatever unsavoury fate awaited them.
“Unbelievable,” Raelar said, one hand on the hilt of his sword, as he moved over to the chest. “How long have you all been in here? This container’s been in the queue for days. I’m surprised we didn’t find a box of corpses.” He opened the chest and his eyes widened. “Lots of supplies, then? Looks like you came prepared.”
Odd. Not the sort of treatment Lola would have expected.
An old koth, skin like cooled magma, shuffled forwards. “What happens to us now? We have nothing. Take us back and they’ll throw us in the dungeons. Or worse.”
Raelar snorted. “What did you expect?” He closed the chest. “Listen, I’m sure it doesn’t feel like it, but we’ve done you a favour. What you were about to do is stupidly risky. If you didn’t suffocate in this box, you’d be on the market the moment you got to London. I’m betting some of you were slaves here. That’s what you’re running from, right? Well, that’s exactly what you were running towards, too.”
The koth turned their head to Lola. “You. You’re not city guard. What are you?”
“Detective Lola Styles, Liaison Officer for the Specialist Dimensional Command on Mid-Earth.” Rather than feeling like a victory, she her gut told her that none of this was going to make matters better for anyone.
There was a ripple, a reaction of sorts, to her name. “Ah,” the koth said, nodding. “You are her. The police officer from London.”
“You know me?”
“Your name is spoken in many places on Palinor, detective.” Their small wings fluttered for a second. “It will not help us. You are not yet where you need to be.”
“Yeah,” Raelar said, “neither are any of you.” He took Lola by the arm and led her back out into the cavernous cargo dock. “We need to get a wagon down here and some backup,” he said as he swung the container door shut. “No way we can sort this on our own. We’re lucky those koth didn’t try to make a break for it.”
The koth’s eyes caught Lola’s though the shrinking gap just as the door closed. Tired, wrinkled, black-rimmed with burning red irises. There was sadness, and sympathy as well.
“What now?”
“They get taken to the lock-up, and hopefully I get some gods-damned recognition for once.” Raelar grinned. “Thanks, Detective Styles. You really unpicked this one. I’d never have figured this out without you. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure that’s all in my report and that the Captain knows how much you helped. I reckon your colleagues back in London will be pretty pleased with this one too, right?”
She nodded absently, thinking back to Clarke finding the container of trafficked people, back on their first case together. This one had felt different, somehow, in a way she couldn’t yet pinpoint.
Someone was behind the trafficking. It would have required significant resources and connection to pull it off. She needed to find out how far up the chain this went, and where those refugees were really being sent.
Thank you for reading!
I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. We managed to get through it despite the best efforts of covid and now have a house crammed with unhealthy snacks and LEGO. Not a bad result, really.
This was the first week I didn’t send out a newsletter on a Monday all year. It felt weird. I’ve been pondering whether to change the frequency of newsletters, shifting from weekly to a slower pace that would enable me to develop more in-depth articles. I still might do that, but for now I think I enjoy writing the weekly too much to move away from it.
Regardless, the Friday chapter of fiction will carry on. As I noted recently, if I don’t write fiction regularly I start to go a bit weird.
This week we did jump into episode 2 of our Babylon 5 rewatch. Do jump on board with us if revisiting 90s science fiction sounds like your sort of thing:
In other reading:
Margaret Atwood weighed in on the debate around Substack’s content moderation, with typical wit and an excellent cartoon about writing more generally. I’ve seen many lovely writers depart already due to Substack’s somewhat naive attitude towards protecting free speech (no, allowing Nazis doesn’t protect free speech, it endangers it). For my part, I’ll be sticking around and exploring some of this through my fiction.
This was an excellent round-up of sci-fi shows for kids, which I really need to respond to. I think I’d add the likes of Voltron, She-Ra, Kipo and The Owl House, for starters.
- shared a bunch of useful tips on how to set up a publication using a range of online tools. Always good to be informed about this stuff. I’m intending to do a refreshed round-up of useful platforms for writers early in the new year.
Last chance for these particular ebook giveaways:
Urban Fantasy Freebies (there are a lot of muscley male torsos on these front covers. I reckon anyone downloading the Triverse sampler will be seriously disappointed)
Author notes
The ‘Railroad’ storyline is one of continually shifting assumptions, as Lola untangles what is really happening. With each realisation the case becomes less fantastical but also more complicated. This latest twist shifts the story into territory that Triverse has touched upon previously - most recently in the ‘Rubbish’ storyline, and also way back at the start with ‘Traffic’.
As well as being a way for me to explore the topic of migration within the Triverse context, it also sets up layered challenges for Lola to navigate. These are not cases with simple solutions. She’s ostensibly ‘solved’ the mystery of the vanishing shipping containers, but that’s only served to open up new questions. Who is running the illegal transit operation? What can or should be done about it? How does Lola feel about the plight of the refugee, and how does she square that with her obligations to follow the law of the triverse and the customs of Palinese justice? She’s not going to find easy answers to any of that.
On the other hand you have Sergeant Raelar, an aen’fa city guard who had managed to carve out a space in a city state that does not offer many opportunities for non-humans. if Raelar’s position is a charity appointment and a box-ticking exercise to keep the bureaucrats in the Joint Council tower happy, it’s an achievement nonetheless. The sort of thing that could open up opportunities for others. Not a shattering of a glass ceiling, but at least introducing a crack. Then again, you have his reaction to the refugees, who he sees as a problem to solve. A small victory for his department and position. Stopping the illegal migrants is a box ticking exercise of his own, with fellow aen’fa (and koth, and humans) on the wrong end of the equation.
Triverse is increasingly about people finding themselves in impossible situations, with no ‘good’ answers or solutions.
Next week I’ll ratchet it up another notch. Poor Lola.
Thanks for sharing!