The Blue Dragons

By Kim Ravensmith

Bruce McDill leaves a secure job at the hydro-cycle factory in Milwaukee to seek adventure on the magna lines that span the globe and are powered by magnetism. He works as a spanner tech for RAM Magna, tightening the ever-loosening knuckle nuts on the pylons along the rail line and ends up leading a crew of techs along the line in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. The crew adopt the name "The Blue Dragons" from the coat-of-arms of Ingolstadt, a city in Bavaria that is the hometown of the only female member, Britta Bayer, who Bruce is enamored of. In his spare time Bruce travels the globe with an Indian friend named Three Dogs, who is also known as Roger Robertson, the Director of Tourism at the hot springs in Thermopolis, near the camp where the railroad workers live on the Wind River reservation.
Bruce learns of the death of an old friend who also worked along the line, and he sets out to investigate. With the assistance of his workmates, he discovers that the elite Elliptical Guard, whose job is to provide security for the more advanced Elliptical Rail Service, is secretly training recruits at the abandoned nuclear facility in Hanover, Washington and he solicits the help of Shining Star, the chief of the Reservation Police at Wind River, to find out what's going on and who was involved in the death of his old friend. He and his crew, along with Three Dogs and Shining Star discover that the Guard is plotting to take over the lucrative security contract for the magna facility in Panama, a major cargo hub for RAM Magna. Bruce accepts a position in the Magna Police Force and together with Three Dogs goes to Panama to hunt down the rogue guardsmen responsible for the murder of his friend and together they bring the perpetrators to justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kim Ravensmith
• Release date: May 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476272023

Book preview

The Blue Dragons

A Magnetic Railway Book

By Kim Ravensmith

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Raven Smith

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Chapter 1

The skies had been abandoned. At the end of the 21st century petroleum reserves were near exhaustion and the number of prospective travelers had increased dramatically, despite the diminishment of the earth’s population by wars. It was no longer economical or feasible to transport humans by airplane. Just in time, the discovery of the Patel Magnetic Process made available an infinite source of power for transportation in a post-war world where manpower and natural resources were still ample enough to allow the construction of a new system for moving goods and people – The Magnetic Railway.

The Patel Magnetic Process, or PMP as it was known, was discovered by a college student from Colorado named Aamir Patel. Aamir was a rock-hound as a youth and attended the Colorado School of Mines as an undergraduate. As a graduate level student majoring in Geology at Indiana University in Bloomington, he was making toast for breakfast one morning when the toaster short-circuited and energized a small metal table where he had piled up some mineral samples he had collected on a recent field trip.

After unplugging the toaster, Aamir noticed that a certain mineral was glowing slightly, and he picked it up to examine it. When he set it back down on the table next to his jelly knife, the knife was immediately attracted to the stone and began to glow. Aamir realized that the mineral sample had been magnetized by the electric current and in turn had energized the knife,

What Aamir had stumbled upon was a method of producing electro-magnetic energy that could be induced onto a steel rail, flowing along like water in a stream for hundreds of miles without dispersing. He spent a year experimenting, finally developing a rudimentary device employing energized minerals to induce a magnetic field. He tested the capability of his system by surreptitiously attaching a lunch-boxed size device to a rail line in Bloomington and following along the path of the railway using a magnetic flux meter to measure the effect. In fact, he did not need a meter to gauge the effect of his device because a bluish hue was immediately produced on the rail he attached to.

He tracked the magnetic signature through Gibson City and Champaign, and down through Danville, Lafayette and Muncie. He measured the output all the way to Indianapolis without detecting a drop in intensity. There he had to break off his research and hurriedly return to Bloomington to remove his device, fearing that the halo of blue light around the rail would be observed by railway employees. In fact, reports of the phenomena were made from as far away as Springfield to the west, Terre Haute to the south and Fort Wayne to the east.

No matter. The events were dismissed as mist in the winter air and forgotten. Upon his return, Aamir sought out a business major friend, Roy Ellis, and together they secured financing and purchased the Eastern Idaho Railroad. In their initial trials in Minidoka they realized that the mineral make-up of the soil somewhat diminished the strength of the signal over a distance, so Aamir designed a system with a single rail standing eight feet above the rail bed. The immediate result was a ten-fold increase in power generation and the new design allowed construction to take place over any kind of terrain since the rail system did not have to conform to the surface of the ground. They then rebuilt the line using a single rail mounted on stanchion supports and newly designed cars were ordered from a manufacturer in Canada. Once in place, the system operated with no cost for energy and only regular maintenance costs.

The technology they employed did not stay secret for long and competitors were soon clamoring for access to it. Wisely, Aamir had patented his discovery and soon the RAM company (Roy-Aamir Magnetics) was the sole distributor of the RAM Magnetic Buss. The new technology spurred the development of larger and larger rail cars and, over the next forty years, the RAM Magna system expanded throughout the world. Abandoned rail lines that had been used as nature trails or had grown over with weeds were reclaimed. New lines were established along scenic routes, both local and long distance, and with the advent of the Schwimmer Buss Transmitter, which extended the magnetic effect up to 100 miles or more over bodies of water, continents were joined at their closest points.

Once the system was in place and the routes established, the RAM cars regularly travelled across continents at astonishing speeds. The speed was hardly noticeable to the passengers due to the stability of the magnetic field, but was limited by the system operators for safety reasons – primarily so that they would be capable of stopping at the next station. For this reason standard speeds for passenger trains were established. The freight haulers, however, did not have the same level of concern, and the speed of the freight trains were not as severely limited. Ultimately the freight lines were constructed in a more robust fashion than the passenger lines, and it was along these lines that the greatest work force of the 22nd century developed.

* * *

Say Yes! the young man at the front of the line said. And again, Say Yes! He was around 5 feet 8 inches tall, and was strong and fit from years of walking the line. He strode along the gravel way under the Northwest Central RAM Line, clad in his gray jumpsuit with his name Bruce stitched onto the back. Over his shoulder he carried a 3 foot Schwimmer Spanner, and he led a group of Spanner Techs along the path, checking the knuckle nuts for evidence of vibration.

Bruce McDill was from Milwaukee. Upon graduation from high-school, he had joined his father and brother at the hydro-cycle plant, where he was given the job of Tire Tester. The job consisted of riding various hydro-cycles around a course to ensure that the tires being manufactured were not faulty. Occasionally, there would be a tire failure and a resultant wobble of the front or rear end, but rarely did a crash result, and after a time, the job became tedious. It was then that he left the cycle factory to seek adventure on the Magna Line.

Behind him, three followers responded to his call, and cried out in answer to him the same Say Yes! except for the last man in line who would occasionally call out Say Oui! because he was from France. The name on the back of his jumpsuit was Henry.

The troop was responding to the sound of a video device carried at chest height by the second to last man in line whose back read Egor. On the screen, a man in a suit was touting the benefits of a career with RAM maintenance, and shouting Say Yes to Adventure at RAM Magna! Each time he made that declaration, Bruce would repeat it, and the others would follow in turn as they walked along the gravel rail bed in a featureless landscape.

The second man in line was not a man at all, but a tall blonde female with Britta on the back of her jumpsuit. She too repeated the catch phrase, and understood what it meant, though she had a limited understanding of any language other than her native tongue, which happened to be German. She really didn’t need to know any other language to communicate because she spoke with her eyes and the expression on her face, which was a mask of such concern and interest that she instilled a sense of calm and well being in everyone she spoke to. Bruce had first noticed her when new hires were being interviewed by the Magna News the December before. She struck a pose before speaking, standing as a model would stand, with one foot forward, and with her hands on her hips she said, in broken English, I am so happy to begin for Magna. RAM make my dreams come true. He blushed watching her on screen, and six months later she appeared in camp and she was assigned to his team!

This late in the 22nd century, in an age so cosmopolitan and connected, one did not expect to encounter people whose knowledge was limited to their own small communities. In fact, there were still people like Britta who had spent their lives in pastoral pursuits and had little familiarity with the world beyond their home towns. She was not without nobility as she was a direct descendant of Pippin the Hunchback who, back in the 700’s, had attempted to depose Charlemagne. She left her home in Bavaria for adventure on the Magna line because as a child she could see from her bedroom window the soft blue light of the Cross Alps Magna Way as it wound its way along the Danube, and she actually did dream of someday working on the Magna. RAM made her dreams come true when they offered her a position with Magna maintenance at a job fair in Munich.

For Bruce, she was the Britta, due to her penchant for placing the before proper names, like the Richard or the Bruce. Her appearance at camp had stunned him to muteness. He had nodded to her and shook her hand and welcomed her to the team and she had grinned widely. After that he often found himself staring at her and once when he saw her across the aisle at the camp store he found that he was riveted to the spot as if bewitched, which she noted and grinned in response to. When they were working together she would stand quite close to him, and he could often feel her breath and watch her chest heave with her labored breathing. Other than these few intimate suggestions their relationship was completely professional up to this point.

The team had Britta to thank for their new name, the Blue Dragons. A name was required by the Magna tracking system in Denver and the three men had been unable to settle on one and were still listed as a number. The morning Britta arrived the team was helping her move into her barracks when Egor spotted the coat of arms of her home town, Ingolstadt, on her luggage. Look at this! he exclaimed to the others, who agreed that the ancient depiction of a blue fire-breathing dragon was a fitting symbol for their newly configured spanner team. Within the month, they each had it tattooed on their upper arms under the standard crossed spanners of their profession.

So here they were today, walking along the gravel way and crying out in response to the Magna Man. All around them for hundreds of yards were Magna Lines at a uniform height, each separated from the next by twenty feet or so of open ground. The Northwest Central area they were stationed in covered the states of Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota. Bruce knew that at that moment, they were in Wyoming, but he was not certain of exactly where they were. He knew that they were in grid 1133462, because that is where they had been assigned that day, but he had not looked at the overall map to see where his grid actually fell. Each day, day after day, the team was assigned a grid to check, and after a while they all ran together, with little to distinguish them but occasional changes in the weather. Sometimes they were up by the Casper Buss, but most of their time was spent along the Wind River line.

Their task, the task of all the Spanner crews, was to walk along the rail line, and using the same piece of equipment that Egor was now watching the Magna Man on, detect loose knuckle nuts and retighten them. Each support stanchion was attached to the main rail by a knuckle nut. The nuts were designed to be robust and were not a matter of concern until the freight runners increased their speeds to over 300 miles an hour. At high speeds some of the nuts began to vibrate and loosen, not enough to compromise the integrity of the structure, but enough to create a high pitched whine when the trains were running. Residents of communities near the Magna Way would complain about the noise, and many solutions to the problem had been suggested, from replacing the nuts to rebuilding the entire line. The decision was finally made to send crews out to locate and tighten the nuts, which, after all, were made out of a composite material of great strength and long life expectancy.

Due to the expanse of Magna lines that were in place, this decision resulted in the creation of a massive work force of Spanner Technicians, and presented an opportunity for many fit and able young people who wanted to get out of their home towns and find adventure. The repetitive nature of the work, however, and exposure to the elements made the job less attractive than others in the system, and the limited number of robust young people to fill the positions available was just the reason for the Magna Man’s entreaty: Say Yes to Adventure at RAM Magna!

This day the Blue Dragon team reached the perimeter of their grid at 10:00 A.M. Egor turned off the Magna Man and calibrated the vibration recorder as he took the lead. Britta came next, gripping her spanner like a spear in front of her, followed by Bruce and then by Henry, who had no spanner, but instead carried a pack with their lunch and other provisions, like medical supplies and water. Along the gravel way they walked, listening for the tone indicating a loose nut. When they heard the tone they would identify the nut, and Britta or Bruce would attach the spanner to it and press the OPERATE button which would result in the nut twisting down tightly to the required torque specifications. That is all there was to it, but they were never bored as they kept a steady pace and had many miles to cover before the day was done.

At lunchtime, they would often find a spot underneath the rail line and spread out a tarp so they would not have to sit on the ground to eat. In inclement weather they used a tent delivered by the Bit train, but when the wind was blowing hard they could usually find shelter under the rail car maintenance platforms. The platforms were spread out at intervals along the line and placed so that trains could be stopped and repaired if they sustained damage. Running at high speed resulted in some greater incidence of part failure and metal fatigue, and the freighters especially carried crews responsible for ferreting out these problems and making repairs. Often, if the spanner crews were working an operating line, they would chance upon a repair crew and trade food and news with them, as the repair crews were usually from far flung and varied stations.

Today the spanner team sat by themselves and ate quietly. It was a sunny and breezy spring day, and they were at the edge of the rail bed, watching horses grazing in the distance. The grid they were in was not in operation, which was fine with all of them, as they could sit and eat without the sensation of rail traffic behind them. On a live grid, there was none of the clattering of wheels or chugging of engines heard on the old time railways. The Magna trains moved along quietly except for the low sound of wind displaced by the