Fantastic Metropolis

“The Tsar has eight million men
with guns and bayonets.
Turn and look at the forest of steel and cannon,
where the Tsar is guarded
by eight million soldiers.
Nothing can happen to the Tsar.”

—Carl Sandburg

On the afternoon of March 16, 1917, midway between Petrograd and the German front, a steam engine made its laborious way through the mountain passes of Latviya.

Icy steel rails cut across a waste of jagged granite. The soot-encrusted engine pulled eleven cars behind it.

In the cab of the engine stood a short barrel-chested man with bristly gray hair and a walrus mustache. His name was Ivan Klosparik. After glancing at his pressure gauges, he returned his gaze to the rails ahead. Ivan was the tsar’s personal engineer, and he took his work seriously.

Ivan was far from his home and his wife. This being wartime, most of Russia’s men were far from home. Ivan had grown up in a tiny oats-and-barley town in the lowlands of Taymyrskiy, half a continent away from these desolate crags. Ivan disliked high altitudes. They made his teeth ache.

Ivan watched the tracks through the plexithane windscreen of the cab. The silver tracks and wooden ties wound their way through bleak diagonals of rock and snowdrift. The engine passed a painted steel pole that served as a distance marker.

Ivan pulled off one of his gloves and keyed the train’s position into the gauge panel. The train system blinked its acknowledgment on the panel’s cathode slate. Ivan shivered and put his glove back on. The wind made a muffled whine. It got in under the cuffs of Ivan’s overalls and chilled his bones.

The train approached a stretch of track that curved to the left. Ivan sat himself on the sill of the open window in the left wall of the cab. He held on to the window frame and leaned into the wind. He ran his eyes along the length of the train as it rounded the curve. Everything appeared to be in order.

Behind the engine rolled the coal car, bearing one passenger, Ivan’s stoker. Behind the coal car came the gunnery car with its armory of antiaircraft rockets and grenade launchers stored inside. The forward gunner’s turret was mounted on its roof. Inside a plexithane bubble, the gunner sat with his hand on the stock of a rotary-mounted Gatling gun. The gunner swiveled restlessly in his chair, scanning the terrain with his binoculars, searching for the slightest sign of ambush or sabotage.

The turret made Ivan feel a little more secure about transporting the tsar and his family through these desolate mountains. But not completely secure. Too many things could go wrong in this world. And the tsar had too many enemies.

The gunnery car pulled the barracks car, quarters for the tsar’s honor guard. The barracks car pulled the wireless car, which bore an elaborate radar dish on its roof.

Fifth came the tsar’s personal coach, a lushly appointed smoking den which was also the mobile headquarters for all of Russia’s armies in the Great War.

Sixth came the coach of Tsarina Alexandra. Then came the recently constructed clinic coach. The clinic coach served as a hospital for the sickly young Tsarevich Alexius and as quarters for the physicians and nurses devoted to his care.

Then came the car for the servants of the imperial family. Then the scullery car. Then the generator car, which supported the rear gun turret. And last the caboose, where Ivan and his stoker slept when they got off duty—and where their relief workers were sleeping now. Since the outbreak of war, all the windows were painted black to discourage snipers.

The train straightened out and crossed a trestle bridge over a gorge. Ivan returned to his station and checked the boiler’s pressure readings. Ivan disliked bridges. It was far too easy to plant bombs in them. But of course the Imperial Intelligence Entelechy would never allow such a thing.

Ivan believed three things as matters of faith. One thing was that the Lord worked in mysterious ways. Another thing was that he would meet his wife in heaven, after they died. The third was that the surveillance abilities of the IIE were utterly infallible. Ivan’s convictions were all that kept him going on days like this.