The Steam Mole (15 page)

The demossing of the entire crack took him about an hour, he reckoned—and had given him less water than he'd hoped—but looking down where he'd started, there was a droplet clinging to the rock. A few precious drops had fallen already onto the dusty floor of the overhang.

It was slow, but it was wet. It took hours before he felt he'd had half enough. He left his shirt under the drip and went back down to the fig that had twisted and climbed its way into the cracks—probably getting more of the water that seeped there than Tim had managed to get to. He ate some more of the yellow little figs. Not too many, because not dying had become more important again.

The birds were not much worried by him, so his next effort was throwing a stone at them. He missed. “You throw like a girl,” he muttered to himself, knowing it wasn't true. Clara hit what she threw at. He'd played darts with her on the
Cuttlefish.

He had to wait a while for a second chance, and then a third. On the fourth attempt he knocked a bird down and managed to grab it as it flapped on the ground. It wasn't dead, but pecking, scratching, and flapping at him. Tim didn't know what to do with it, but he had it now, and had injured it, so he hit its head with a rock.

The brightly colored little thing was still and dead.

Now he had to decide what to do with it. And he really had no idea. They plucked birds, didn't they? So Tim tried. It was a lot easier to think of than to do. There were a lot of feathers, and they were well and truly attached to the bird. When they eventually did
come off… so did the skin. After some more attempts that seemed to be more about getting the fine downy under-feathers to stick to his hands than actually getting them off the bird, Tim decided to just pull the skin off. That worked a bit better. Tim found a lot of the bird was feathers, and the end result from his effort was very small. The drumsticks were the size of the first joint of his pinky finger. He knew from cleaning tunnel rats that the guts had to come out. But doing it with a not very sharp penknife, no water, and no experience was difficult. Even under his overhang there were flies coming in to “help” him. In the end he had a gutted and mostly featherless bird, though bits of the fluffy down stuck to everything. At this point he knew he ought to cook it, but he had no way of doing so.

He wondered what raw bird tasted like. He supposed he'd have to find out, sooner or later. And it had better be sooner, before any more flies tried to settle on it. He cut a little sliver. Tried to tell himself it was good for him. A part of his mind, as he chewed with determination, told him that they always said nasty medicine was good for you, and when he really tried to pretend it wasn't raw bird, it went down. On both the positive and the negative sides, there wasn't a lot of it.

Lampy sniffed. There was of course the wonderful smell of wet after rain, but he could smell the dust and heat on the back of the breeze coming out of the interior. It smelled of dry. It smelled like freedom, and a long way from cities and filth and being chained up. He'd never thought about it before, but now that he'd been there, he knew they'd have to kill him rather than chain him up or lock him in again.

He had to wonder if he was right in his head. He was behaving like some fool who'd been on the grog, and he wouldn't touch the stuff, not after what he'd seen it do to his pa. His father had been all right when he wasn't drinking. Except he got the shakes if he didn't. Lampy shook his head. Here he was heading straight toward where he said he'd never go near.

The Irishman played games with his mind, talking about his family. There was something about the way Jack had said it that sounded just like his uncle talking. The uncle who came to fetch him away when his mother died, who took him back to his land and his people.

The uncle who said everything in life was a circle and would come back around one day.

That was the uncle a horrified boy had watched shot down. When Lampy had run forward to help, another shot had ricocheted off the stones. And there'd been a bunch of whitefellers standing there, laughing, at the mouth of one of those tunnels, guns in hand.

And his uncle said, with his last breath, that he should go. Run.

Jack and Lampy eventually bunkered down in a gully with some small trees for shelter, as the rain had vanished as if it had never been. It was dusk, and Jack was literally so tired he could hardly walk another step.

“I reckon we better take a smoko and get some tucker into ourselves,” said Lampy, squatting down. “You look all in, Irishman.”

Jack knew by now what a smoko was and what tucker meant. He didn't smoke, even if he'd had anything to smoke, or to light it with, but the break was good. “I didn't get any more of the food, I'm afraid, but for the half sandwich I gave you back there. I think Rainy got the driver's sandwiches.”

“Got tucker here,” said Lampy, showing straight white teeth against the black of his face. “Only you whitefellers don't eat it.”

“Watch me.”

Which was how Jack ended up digging for grubs and making a show of appreciating them. Actually they tasted a bit like almond paste, if you could forget the texture and the fact that they were insect larvae. It was, he realized, some kind of test. He was right, too. “Mostly women and kids eat them,” said Lampy, who plainly considered himself a man. “I like 'em more cooked, but we not gunna make a fire until we get a little more far away. I got a perente back there. We'll eat 'im when we stop in the morning.”

“We've got to go on tonight?” Jack knew the answer before he even asked the question, but his feet were sore, and he was tired.

“Too right. Them dogs are good, and they got horses, man. They prob'ly pay a couple of blackfellers with a few bottles of grog to track us, too. They follow us easy, now the rain is gone. We got to move at night and hide and sleep in the daytime.”

“I'm just worried about my feet. They're not as tough as yours. I'm starting on blisters by the feel of it. I want to be able to walk or even run when I have to.”

He saw the gleam of those white teeth in the darkness again. “You whitefellers have got soft feet. Wait up. I go find some paperbark.”

By the time Lampy had finished with Jack's feet, Jack felt as if he should be in a horror biograph about Egyptian mummies. The flat, flexible sheets of bark, like cheap newsprint, had been made into something like socks and tied in place with cord or held by the sandals. It did make a huge difference.

Lampy plainly had a goal in mind, and he kept them walking. He wasn't too impressed with Jack's fire bucket of water. By the time he'd fallen over several things and spilled most of it, Jack wasn't too impressed with it either.

By predawn they'd crossed miles of plain and returned to a channel with a cloak of small trees and shrubs. The rain farther east, where they had literally waded in the flood, had not made it here, but the water had. It was being devoured by the thirsty soil just about as fast as it flowed, which was not very fast. Still, there was a shallow stream of brown water for Jack to fill the bucket and bathe his feet.

“When a big wet comes, she'll get miles wide. We're a bit early in the season, but if that happen, they ain't gunna track nothing. They be lucky if half their railway don't wash away. Them Westralian bastards do a better job with water. They got the whole thing underground on the highest ground,” said Lampy, working on making a fire.

He'd used the knife Jack had taken from the fireman to cut a wedge into some old, soft, dead wood, and line it with something rather like the paperbark he'd wrapped Jack's feet in. He whittled a blade out of a second, much harder piece of wood, and sawed furiously in the wedge until eventually the bark began to smoke. The smoldering bark he put under a pile of dry grass he'd prepared, and Lampy gently blew that into catching fire. It didn't look particularly hard, but Jack Calland wasn't fooled. He knew he'd probably try for a week and fail, and he said as much.

Lampy grinned. “It don't work as fast as a match, though. My uncle made me learn. Now we go cook this perente.”

A perente proved to be the big, ugly, mottled, three-foot-long lizard that Lampy had tied over his shoulder. It tasted a bit like chicken.

“Better than prison bread,” said Jack, exhausted. “What now?”

“I go cut me a couple of spears, use the fire to harden them up a bit, and we put it out, move away from it in case som'thing smell it, and then we sleep.” He yawned.

Jack yawned, too. It was infectious. “Will you show me how to make a spear, too?” asked Jack. It was no answer to a rifle, but in absence of that, he'd take whatever he could.

Lampy laughed. “They chuck you out of Westralia if you show up with a spear, and maybe some throwing sticks, eh. They don't like whitefellers gettin' too friendly with the blackfellers.”

“Their loss. I'd be hungry by their rules.”

He was so tired that he barely managed to help Lampy. The boy was tougher than he was. Jack went to sleep, knowing this was the first time he'd done so as a free man for more than three years. And maybe…maybe he'd really get to see his wife and daughter again, if in truth they were in Westralia. He'd learned not to believe the stories Duke Malcolm's men told him. But there had to have been a reason for shipping him off to Australia.

Duke Malcolm had been watching the reports out of Australia quite intently. He wanted to know just how effective they'd been in bottling up the nitrate problem that had so upset his brother Albert. Last he'd heard the woman was in a coma, and the Westralian scientific establishment had made no headway at all with her notes. Their experimental pressure vessel had reached a hundred and twenty atmospheres and they'd had no results. Well, so much for that. What a waste of effort it had been. She was probably dead by now, and all that effort and money had been wasted chasing her. But the duke
carried his grudges well. It would serve as a grim warning to other traitorous scum if she were dead. Then there was the military venture in Queensland. The Empire was of course involved in half a dozen such exercises on different scales across the globe, though few had the financial pay-off potential of this one, or would have quite such a painful impact on an upstart nation. They'd really angered him with the Calland affair. Safe havens on what had once been a part of the British Empire sent a bad message.

The head of the Australia desk brought the report up himself. That was never a good sign. The weekly digest wasn't due for another two days. Duke Malcolm looked at the report on his desk. Tapped his teeth with a new ivory cigarette holder. It wasn't as good as the old one, but it also held a hidden, poisoned blade. “Tell me the worst. Save me reading it and sending for you.”

“We've had something of a problem in Ceduna, Your Grace. Griffiths got himself caught, along with Dr. Foster.”

“I see. To what extent has our network been compromised? It shouldn't be too bad. Griffiths was sent in especially to handle Foster. A good agent.”

“We're not too sure how much he gave away, if anything. If our informant is correct he shot Foster to prevent him from talking, but was badly wounded himself. We have a second string of agents…but they're finding things quite hot. The Marconi transmissions were tracked. The Westralians are quite technologically adept in some areas, and our men are being hunted rather hard right now…because of a bit of miscommunication.”

“Tell me about this ‘miscommunication,'” said Duke Malcolm evenly. He prided himself on his self-control.

“Well, it concerned the honey trap for the child. The Calland girl. You wanted her used as lever, so the father was sent to Queensland. The message included a written letter from him, and it all took a little time.”

“Hardly applicable now that the woman is dead,” said the duke,
losing interest. Revenge was sweet, but best when accompanied by reward.

“Er…She appears to have recovered somewhat, Your Grace.”

“What? That idiot Foster was supposed to make sure she did not recover.”

“He was caught and killed, Your Grace,” said the major.

“Not that it matters. The process didn't work after all. And those Rebel Australians are supposed to have a scientific edge, or so my brother informs me.”

“In other fields, Your Grace. Their Chemistry is quite weak. Professor Henderson is a chemist…well, he's the sort you promote to politics to get rid of.” The major flushed. “Outside of the Empire of course.”

“Of course,” said Duke Malcolm, marking this man down for an unpleasant and short future. Disrespect for power was not an attitude he needed. “So what you're telling me is that she's recovered and succeeded? That's not going to be good news for Prince Albert?”

“We don't actually know. The Westralians appear to have thrown a real blanket of secrecy over it all.”

“I see. So we need to go ahead with the plan to take the girl as a hostage. Start acting on this.”

The officer was silent.

Eventually, the duke lost patience. “What is it, man?”

“That side is a mess, Your Grace. You see, you gave orders…You told me Jack Calland was no longer a prisoner of value. He's been sent to the railway. And…and as I said there was a miscommunication. The message and our offer have already been given to the girl.”

“Get this Jack Calland back. If the mother is involved, she's shrewd enough to want proof that he's alive, and he's too valuable for the railway. Is the girl willing? Or has that gone awry, too?”

“The girl is missing, Your Grace. And they're blaming us.”

Something about the way he said that raised alarm bells in Duke Malcolm's mind. “And
have
we got her?”

The major shook his head. “We don't think so. The…situation in Ceduna is fairly volatile right now. Our agent sending the Marconi message may have been caught. He stopped at that point. But he did say counterintelligence agents were searching all the metal cargoes going out.”