V=IR: Part Seven - Faraday's Law

[x-forge.livejournal.com]

Having removed themselves from their initial mode of transportation across the Siberian countryside, Forge and Doug are forced to improvise, in a manner that will significantly displease one of them.






Thankfully, Forge repeated to himself, he'd managed to grab his duffle bag before they'd disconnected the train car. Having heated environmental suits and GPS equipment made trudging across Siberia merely infuriating instead of suicidal.

He tapped his earpiece, opening the connection with the identical one he'd provided Doug with. "Okay, according to satellite photos I'm getting from the internet, there should be a village less than a mile from here. I can't see crap in this snow, but so long as we keep moving north, we should be able to get some shelter and hopefully a car or at least a lift to the nearest station where we can get another route to Tunguska."

"Okay, a mile. That's doable." Doug was also thankful for the heated suits, as exposure could have been a very real danger without them. As it was, he rubbed his hands together and blew on them before jamming them in his pockets and hunching his shoulders against the howling Siberian wind. "Let's get going," he said, as standing around by the stopped train car wasn't going to get them anywhere. He started trudging in the direction Forge had identified as north.

Pulling a heated mask up over his mouth and nose, Forge lowered the thick goggles over his eyes and watched the snow-obscured landscape resolve itself into an electronic false-color image of millimeter-wave radar and laser rangefinding. He toggled a hidden switch on his duffle bag, feeling the weight inside redistribute as the pack conformed to his body, automatically adjusting the straps. Confident in his gear, he stepped out of the car and began following Doug.

"You know," he said, "despite this unsurprisingly annoying headache, something occurs to me."

There was no denying Forge's brilliance with technology. Doug couldn't imagine how utterly in a bind they might have been if it weren't for that, and Forge's clear-headedness in snatching his duffel. "Okay, I'll bite. What occurred to you?" he asked the inventor curiously.

"Was it just me," Forge continued, "or did the Dynamic Duo back there seem a bit unclear as to what they were heading to Tunguska for? I mean, we've managed to find the link to Tesla's wireless power transmission experiment, but did you get the feeling that maybe they were following us here?"

"Wow. You really know how to put a cheerful spin on things, don't you," Doug groused as they struggled forward through the wind and snow drifts. It was a valid point, though. They'd assumed Milan and Cortez had been a jump ahead of them the whole time. If that had been the case, why hadn't they already gotten to Tunguska? "How could they have been tracking us, then?"

Forge shrugged, the gesture all but invisible under the heavy parka and driving snow. "I'm a genius, not an intelligence analyst. All we really know is that they believe whatever lies in Tunguska is the key to Tesla's lost inventions, and that's something they can't get their hands on."

"I don't know that it's necessarily that they can't get their hands on it," Doug mused. "Maybe it's that they couldn't decode the input the theremin, so they needed to follow us in order to find out where to go next?" Which was an equally unpleasant theory.

Forge grunted in agreement, then plugged a cable from his goggles into his PDA, safely holstered on his hip. In moments, he saw the familiar blink of a wireless connection indicator appear in his field of vision, and began a search. "Okay," he announced a minute later, "looks like due to the rail car disconnect, the train's being held over at the next stop, according to the TSR's internal communications site. That should slow them down considerably. I think we can charter a plane to Irkutsk if we can get to... Cherdyakov, it's a former science city about a hundred and forty kilometers from here, they've got an airfield that hey use for surveyors."

"Well, I certainly am not walking a hundred and forty clicks in the dead of Siberian winter. Because that's what we'd likely wind up. Dead. Hopefully they'll have cars or something in this podunk village you saw on the map."



***


"They can't even spare a car? Not even one of those crappy Ladas that they seem to love here in the godforsaken wilderness?" Forge complained, shaking the snow off his coat in the foyer of what seemed to be a combination town hall/public house where the villagers were enjoying either an electoral meeting or a bar mitzvah by the sound of things. Probably both.

"They have one car in the entire town, and it's down for maintenance. And even if you fixed it, which believe me, I volunteered your services, they refuse to let us have the only car in town." Doug shook his head. "Thankfully, there seems to be an abundance of horses, so it would be inaccurate to term this a 'one horse town'. One car, but plenty of horses. I was able to buy us a couple. We can ride to the science city. It's probably going to take us a while, but the good news is these are pretty sturdy horses, and they're used to the weather, so I'd say... maybe a day of riding. I was able to get us some supplies, so we should be okay there as long as we don't get lost."

Forge froze in his tracks, face going pale. "Tell me that 'horses' is a Russian euphemism for 'all-terrain snowmobile', you're going to tell me that, right? Not actual teeth-gnashing four-hooved engines-of-death horses, you mean? Right?"

That was not simply an 'it's really cold here in Siberia' paleness. Doug covered his face with one hand and shook his head. "Four hooved engines of death?" he repeated incredulously.

"Have you seen the damage horses can do to people?" Forge blurted, voice tight and high-pitched. "I used to have two arms before I tried to ride one of those equine murder machines." Admittedly, Forge thought to himself, the horse had only been the catalyst for the discovery of the bone degeneration that cost him the remainder of his left arm, but he did know how to hold a grudge against the species.

"So you mean we're going to ride actual horses from here to Science City Cherdyakov? They really only have one car?" he asked hopefully.

"Yes, Forge, we are going to ride actual horses. They really only have one car." Forge was afraid of horses. This was absolutely going to end well. Why couldn't he be afraid of something that actually was legitimately more likely to kill him? Like bees. Especially Nazi bees. Doug shook his head again and looked to where one of the helpful villagers was leading a pair of saddled horses to the two foreigners. "Spasiba," Doug said, inspecting the horse's tack with a practiced eye before swinging himself easily into the saddle.

"Those are real horses," Forge said in a shaky voice, not bothering to pull his hood up. "No carts or anything like that? You want me to ride a horse."

"Yes, Forge, I want you to ride a horse." Doug sighed in extremely put-upon fashion, and hazarded a quick glance upward, as if to say 'why me?' Then he grinned a somewhat evil grin. "Okay, Forge, let me put it to you this way. You can either get on your own goddamn horse and stop being a ninny, or you can get on my horse and ride a hundred and forty klicks with your arms around my waist. In which case I get to call you 'Princess Forge-erina' for the entire rest of this trip." He leaned forward over the saddle horn and smirked. "Are you a pretty pretty princess, Forge?"

Growling under his breath, Forge pulled up his hood and tugged his goggles over his eyes. "I never liked you at all," he cursed as he struggled up into the stirrups. "And I suddenly want very bad things to happen to you."

Thankfully, Forge's horse was on the placid side, and the pair got underway without any incidence of broken limbs. The kilometers rolled away in a ground-covering canter, and there was little talking as they rode. Doug guided his horse without much thought, leaving plenty of spare brainpower to ponder the events of the trip. "Hey, how did Milan know my name?" he asked suddenly.

Forge thought about that for a moment, arms wrapped in a bearhug around his horse's neck. "I must have said it, right? Unless someone at the Club let him know we were there to see his totally non-working machine. That's probably it. I hate this spy stuff. I hate this horse. I hate the goddamn Mafiya, I hate Francisco Milan and I really hate Siberia!" he shouted into the snow, spooking his horse slightly. "I swear to god, I'm beginning to understand why this entire country's so goddamn cranky all the time."

Doug shrugged. "Nichevo," he said in response to Forge's tirade. "They're not so much cranky. Really it's a sort of fatalism, accepting what you can't change. Nichevo," he repeated. They rode for a few moments, and Doug replayed the entire exchange in the dining car back in his head. "No, I'm almost positive you didn't introduce me. Milan and Cortez came in, Cortez introduced himself, they attempted to bribe us with traveler's checks, and then they whistled up those thugs. Literally."

Forge smacked a hand against his forehead. "I booked the tickets in our names. All they had to do was check the passenger manifest. I suck at the spy stuff, point made."

Doug shook his head, unsatisfied. "But how'd they know we were on that particular train in the first place? It's not like the Trans-Siberian Railway only has one train running on the tracks at a time..." He frowned. "They had to have been tracking us some other way, but I'm damned if I know how."

Tapping commands into his PDA, Forge adjusted the view on his goggles. "Okay, neither one of us is giving off any RF signals aside from the burst transmissions from my wireless, and I know damn well those aren't being hacked. We're so far off the grid right now that I'll bet Logan couldn't even follow us."

"You might be surprised." Doug might not like the Canadian feral at all, but there was no denying his skills at tracking. And he rather suspected that Logan would feel right at home in the Siberian plains. He shrugged and clucked at his horse, nudging it into a trot again with his knees.