Chronicle Of The Knights Of Axes Of Honor: RetroStar Chronicles, #3

By K.A Edwards and R.D. Ginther

The Knights Of The Axes Of Honor, a sequel and spin-off to Chronicle 62, brought much needed closure to the many mysteries and devastations that rocked Earth II. Two new heroes arose in this very delightful tale of espionage, car chases, kidnapping, murders and much, more, will leave you hanging at the edge of your seat and wanting more. The adventurers/heroes were two unlikely young men whose lives became intertwined because of extraordinary circumstances, due to the influence of FC. Ero, the Greek athlete, thrown into the wargame with Captain Pikkard in the Argo V, found himself in a series of adventures that led him to Damon. Forged together like brothers, these two were handpicked by FC to further assault the kingdom of darkness operated by the evil jewel stones. These two young heroes are taken to their first mission together where they encountered their mentor Tithonus, quite by accident. Altogether these three became five, then two again and finally two more heroes joined Ero and Damon to be four, for one more severe battle. Disasters are looming, and now the four horsemen, the knights of the axes of honor must ride!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eben Ginther
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215397046

Book preview

VOLUME 3

CHRONICLE of the Knights of Axes of Honor

Anno Stellae 10,200

Part 1 THE CHRISTMAS PRODIGAL

ERO, A GREEK FROM SERIPHOS, the Olympic Torchbearer for his island,  hadn't the slightest inkling at the time he was waiting for his relay to bring the torch to him to run with to the next relay that he was about to embark on a much greater adventure than the Olympics could possibly provide him.  He was dreaming of Olympic glory, to be sure,  even gold medals to hang on his chest that all the girls of Seriphos would swoon over, but meanwhile other forces greater than his personal dreams were at work to undo them and thrust him into worlds and tests and challenges utterly strange to him and totally unknown.

In the 20th-21st centuries The New York World Trade Center in lower Manhattan featured in its multi-structured complex  two main twin towers, called North and South Towers.  The  North Tower with its signature mast of a towering TV antenna, struck first by a gang of Muslim Saudi Arabian terrorists-on-hire-for-jehad in their hijacked commercial jet was  carrying 20,000 gallons of jet fuel and a load of captive passengers along to their unknown fate (many thought they would be returned to the airport and released eventually, as the hijackers promised them, and only when they were killing stewardesses did they have second thoughts about their ultimate destination).

The South Tower was soon in the same shape as the North twin, being struck by yet another hijacked commercial jet carrying passengers and 20,000 gallons of jet fuel.

In cyberspace,  Ero the Olympic Torch Bearer turned Alien Entity-challenger was given a ringside view of the catastrophes, as his flying dome zeroed in on the site of what was to be called Ground Zero.  He flew up while the Towers were still standing, burning from the top down for a number of floors, but still stupendous and impressive as the once tallest buildings in the world, which these were until surpassed by the Sears Tower in Chicago.

The South Tower, though mortally struck after the North Tower, was first to collapse.  Yet who could foresee it?  It had to happen to be believed.  It was unthinkable until it fell and bit its own dust before the eyes of the watching, horrified world.  And the people inside the doomed Tower were just as incredulous, that  anything like that was going to happen to it, and to them.  But for the souls caught above the second jet's impact zone, it was a little more desperate in appearance.  Smoke and fire were driving them outward, to gasp for air at the windows, which they broke out to  escape the toxic fumes if they could.

Once they had done that, it was impossible not to look down to the ground, if they could see it at all—far, far, far, far below—almost a thousand feet below their frantically searching eyes, in fact.

Was there anyone coming to rescue them?  Where were the helicopters?  The phone lines were jammed, the cellphones useless in their hands, as they kept punching numbers or redial.  But some reached home, or loved ones,  or 911, for all the good that would do. 

They could only scream, or cry, or—if they mustered the emotional control—coolly recite their own epitaphs:  I am on such an such number floor, waiting for someone to come and get us down from here. 

Or, if less controlled,  their quavering, high-pitched terror-stricken voices shouting or screaming about fire, smoke, at the window, trapped, with no one in sight coming. 

The voices got more frantic as the people  became more hopeless.  Isn’t anyone coming for me?  Gotta get out of here soon—flames, smoke, it is way too hot to stay here, I have to—

Time for them was fast running out. 

Then facing tsunami-like, moving walls of approaching flames and smoke, they had to scream or shout their last words and goodbyes,  throw their useless cell phones away,  and start, Lord have mercy, jumping.

It was better to jump out a window than burn alive.  Right?  Was it really?  They didn't have time to meditate on their choices.  The all-consuming firewall,  billowing and shapeshifting into a roaring dragon,  was coming at them with a roaring furious dragon—burning ferociously hot, its nostrils emitting flame and smoke like blast furnaces.

People further from the windows, too to keep ahead of the flames, were being caught in it,  toasted black, incinerated before their eyes, when they hesitated jumping and tried to run back through the flames or make a try to get to the stairs. 

Jump!  Now!  Don't burn like that!  That’s what the instincts said to each person faced with the firewall.

To try make a decision like that isn’t easy.  It isn't rational, there isn't time to think,  fear is pounding like jackhammers in your heart and ears and your skin feels like lead on your arms and legs, electric lead, somehow liquid, covering you, yet vibrating your bones into jelly—shaking you and paralyzing you with dread—yet...

Don't burn like that!  Jump out!  NOW!

That was what their instincts demanded (overriding their sense of self-preservation or fear of heights, even this height they were at), or be burned to a crisp in a second! 

So they obeyed, squeezing their fear-paralyzed bodies like solidified sacks of Readi-cement out the windows somehow,  and when falling, falling, they began to face that they were already  dead, even as the ground, all too soon, rushed upwards with a terrific noise and wind at them, as if they were hurled through a wind tunnel turned on end.

It wasn't fair, they were only office workers at their jobs—who did this to them?

But all that didn't matter now!  They were going to smash up just the same. 

They knew only one thing—not their murderers, not some court trying their case, not some judge awarding punitive charges on their behalf, not some Congressional board of inquiry droning on and on in Washington about the tragic incident, no, none of that:  they simply had to now face individually whatever it felt like to impact the  cement on the ground. 

Flesh against cement, blood against stone—bone was just as fragile?  Their bodies were instantly pulverized,  blood spraying out like a fountain, the whole physical form dissolved into a collapsed blob that had once been a human being, with a name, a career, a family, dreams,  a future, and...it was all nothing now but a blob in a pool of blood mixed with flesh and bone and clothing on the ground, which people were screaming at and trying to run around to get away from the horror as quick as they could.

They could not be blamed for fleeing the dead.

It is not a pretty thing to see fellow human beings, all sizes and ages, drop and smash on the cement of the World Trade Center Plaza like so  many eggs from the upper floors of the Towers—pop, pop, pop!

Viva Osama bin Ladin the mastermind murderer of so many!

Happy news is on the way to cheer him.  It will exceed his highest expectations.  His wives, Zuhrah, Fatima, Gubdugah, Beepee, Shellackah, Oila, Lubricatah, Filippasixtysixa,  and all the other tattooed damsels in his harem,  will be so happy for him, and give him many more children to add to the 22 (at last counting) he already has in his quiver.

They will dance and sip Coca Cola with gold and diamond-studded straws and ululate until the wee hours of the night!  How the Americans will be humbled when they see their towering, gleaming WTC destroyed—the fabulous New York in shambles in a  mass panic and exodus from the city, and Washington too aflame with the Capitol and Pentagon destroyed, and five-star Pentagon generals running hatless down the streets after screaming secretaries, who aren't in better shape, but have just had skirts burned off their milk-white American buttocks!

To Osama’s family’s thinking, they brought it all on themselves, after all—defying Allah the Compassionate, defying His Prophet, for whom Saudi his motherland was holy and inviolate, until the Infidel Americans had come, his country betrayed by the king,  and set up their military bases, contaminating holy ground with  infidel feet, urinating on the Sacred Motherland as they stood, feet splayed far apart like a rutting camel's,  spraying the whole holy countryside of the sacred homeland! 

This smashing and burning of the WTC was just the start of what he planned he would do to them, to drive them out of Saudi, back to their nasty holes, and leave Holy Saudi alone forever!

This was just the beginning.  After all, the Americans themselves, many of them in the universities and in the media, agreed with his views and said they were deserving of such a thing as this for America's alliance with the Little Satan of Israel and its terrible mistreatment of the poor, helpless Palestinians (though Palestinians to the Saudi were donkey dung, not much better than infidels, fit only to be trod underfoot)—so, Allah be praised,  he was only giving them what these infidels, pigs, and monkeys, said they wanted, broadcast by famous news anchors every day on American TV  that this was the sort of blowback for American imperialism they all deserved.

After saving all he could by evacuating many on top his mast-bot, then letting them of on ground level, Ero did not have to deal with the likes of Osama bin Ladin, fortunately for Osama the Magnificent, as the flying mast-bot carried him quickly toward the exit of the photo-cell.

Bursting through into the inner Eye of the Vampire Bat, the mast nearly collided with a photo-cell dealing with John Barth but instead of that theologian's poisoned world, Ero converged with the photo-cell that swept him down into Atlantis II.

Below him stretched mind-numbing, level plains, deserts, arid vastness that seemed to have no end:  the waterless, aluminate hardpan Nullabora barrens, which  culminated in the East Erg, a field of mountainous sand dunes.  Here in the east of Atlantis II, there was only one way to cross the  Nullabora and live to tell about it, and that was by train, the legendary Tea and Sugar Express Train.

So for Ero the Torch Bearer, the wannabe but never-will-be Olympic champion, it's off to Atlantis II on the Re-located Earth!  Rather, it's Kastorr,  Wally's Cyberspatial version of it.  Or to be more precise, it's the Carbuncle, with the Sea of Doubt-encircled palace-residence of the Vampire, its eyes whirling within with a photo-celled universe made up mostly of things that never happened the way they were intended by the Creator. 

Ero is the virus, injecting a new strain of possibility,, once he is operating on his own via his cyber-spatial argosy, his own personal Argo.  It is the detached mast from that classic specimen of 19th century railroad architecture, the Union Station Dome of Tacoma in the Pacific Northwest of North America.

Beneath an enormous, burning, searingly bright, virtually cloudless sky of his latest photo-cell landscape, he saw an aging diesel-electric train moving steadily at 50 mph across a seemingly horizon-less plain that could claim no features, it was so flat and level and barren. 

There was not the slightest reason in the midst of this kind of table-level topography to put a curve in the track, so it ran absolutely straight, with a deadly monotony that had driven many a trainmaster either alcoholic, or suicidal, or raving out of his mind.

The Tea and Sugar, a mixed-goods, general-store kind of train  delivered track supplies and transports work crews called fetlers, as well as pay to train maintenance people posted at a seemingly endless, beaded string of small depots and settlements strung along  1,000 plus miles of track.

Just as he was about to descend toward it, the Port Ulu to Multan flight flew across his own flight path.

Unable to alter the flight plan encoded by Wally in the Kater's Compass, Ero converged with the old prop airliner.  At the last moment, the guidance system in the Compass sensed an obstacle, and Ero was turbo-thrusted up over the plane, directly in view of the airliner's startled pilots.

Encountering this apparent UFO, the pilots entered it as such in their log, but without any means within hundreds of miles that could be sent to investigate, they continued with hardly any surprise or emotion on their way to Multan.

The train was the single narrow ribbon of life drawn across a seemingly limitless stretch of its opposite—a barren nothingness that scarcely supported anything but scrubby brush, a few lizards and snakes,  some rabbits and dingoes, and a multitude of fiery stinging ants and scorpions. 

No wonder the tiny human groups clustered along the tracks at widely separated intervals, rush to the trackside or depot (if they have a depot) at the first telltale sound or tremble of the rails. 

Sometimes only three people, a single family, greeted the train, but it stopped for them, to keep them supplied with the necessities, at cost, lest the entire coastland would become uninhabited, and left open for conquest—for what valuables exactly, nobody residing there could figure.

The dome mast, guided by his ingeniously-programmed compass, followed the train for some distance, and a river bed, normally dry, was reached.

A flash flood, hundreds of miles away, had sent water far down to the coast, where wild boys from some neighboring tribe had been playing in it when Ero appeared and scattered them witless off the bank and into the muddy water.

Damon  Santiago Coxie,  a distant descendant of Coxie and his circus performers saved by Wally before Earth II’s re-location,  a free-lance photographer from Poseidonia,  thirtyish and experienced in his trade,  was aboard, this trip across the  Nullabora, the Big Empty Eating Board as the desert’s sea-coral strewn plain was called by natives.

He had done his homework on this southernmost stretch of country and its one highway, the double gauge track, that carried travelers 310 miles without a single jog.  Normally, there should be few surprises—but somehow Damon wasn't so sure this time. 

Geologists and cartographers knew it technically as the South-Eastern Erg, but the people who actually lived there, suffering the  hellishness of it, called it by name after the empty food board they used to keep it above the ant-infested sands, perhaps hoping to personalize it a bit and make it a little more bearable.

After all, humanity has that trait, naming things to better get control of them.

But the Nullabora, controlled? Damon thought.  What a silly idea.  It can only be endured, with the patience of a hapless lizard that ran too far after a fly, and now is  frying out in the open on sizzling hot hardpan, its sightless eyeballs shrinking and blackening in their sockets while the ants are busy already on the carcass.

The lizard controlled nothing,  after all, and the fly got away, flying and buzzing about until he eventually ran into a smarter lizard. 

A free-roving photographer for the Poseidonian Government Tourist Office, this wasn't Damon’s first trip photographing the world from a train—but he  knew the Tea and Sugar on the uttermost southern edge of the continent would be different from the other stretches of track and their mountain-climbing  narrow gauge rails. 

Then national, imperial Herukan-Ratnan authorities, anxious to gather tourist  revenues from this vast wasteland to help pay for its upkeep, issued visas to  Publica-texans and other rich Outlanders,  but that did not mean they would not plant a spy or two aboard the train, just to keep their activities in view.

Photographers, as a tribe, have an innate sense about such things, and so it proved, the moment he climbed aboard at Port Olu (also called Port Abdullah, Ulla or Olu for short), he suspected, way down in his gut,  something highly out of the ordinary lay in store for him in the itinerary if he was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.

A railway in such a depopulated, barren wilderness as the Nullabora was bound to collect some strange types, he knew.

They were the detritus, the flotsam and jetsam, of society, washed in by hardship and bad times somewhere else where they could no longer afford to live, or maybe they were even just one step ahead of the law, fleeing from the authorities after some murder or robbery?

The train carried the usual consignment of railway workers, and common contract laborers, the fetlers, but there were paying passengers, second class and even a few first class fares like himself who frequented the dining car and kept its staff and professional cooks employed.

First class proved a crashing bore, he soon found, the usual wealthy foreigners, over-dressed for the Nullabora, stuffing in too much rich food than was good for them.

After a glance into the stuffy society of  the dining car,  he crossed with relief to the second class compartments.  Soon he found the types he had hoped to photograph—original aborigines, such as Ismail the rabbit hunter.

Returning to his old haunts from Port Ulu, after selling his collected, dried rabbit skins to a furrier who lined the robes and gloves and even the  turbans  of  the imans and nobles who lived in the far, colder north,  Ismail had provisioned himself anew with tobacco, tea, and some other luxuries. He was enjoying his trip back to nowhere, where he roamed alone and wifeless and relatively happy for someone having nobody but himself to account to, and nary a centavo in his pocket most of the year.

Damon always conversed with his subjects while photographing them—as he wanted to know the personal details of their lives, and something of their soul struggles, that would help him get the best picture, help him seek the unique quality of that person that made the person individual.

So he asked the wandering, one-legged rabbit-hunter who was stumping through on the car where Damon was taking pictures, asked him about his rabbit-hunting, which the man showed by his scowl he was not very happy to tell him about since nobody else ever asked him anything about it and its was none of their  business!

Damon knew he would react this way, as few Nullaboreans would want to tell the secrets of their past, or their former lives before they fled to the wilderness to escape all manner of things.

Yet sometimes these tight-lipped natives  let down their guard and told total strangers, such as Damon was, everything, knowing there wouldn’t be any repercussions, since their hearer wasn’t going to stay and would soon be gone, out of sight and out of mind, far as the Nullabora was concerned.

Damon’s instinct was spot on.  The man sidled over to him in the carriage and beckoned him with a coal-black, chipped-nail thumb to follow.

Giving Damon a conspiratorial wink, he drew him aside to a place between the two cars, where the wind was roaring and the wheels clattering as if they might be coming off any second, but where there was no chance they would be overheard.

Oh, now that you asked,  it's a bloody life, mate! My peg leg hurts something bloody awful at times, as if I still have a leg there!  I can hardly sleep at times, but I can't help having it along, I have to walk on somepin!  But the skins are always top rate quality here—the best on the market in Port Ulu!  They pay me well there!  I make my trip in every couple months, with all I collect (dried to toast by this bloody sun and wind out here), and get my pay, and head for the bloody Rabbit and Wolf Club in town, and when I wake up a couple days later wherever they happen to throw me carcass—I always search for my secret stash in my wooden leg, and, sure enough, they hadn't thought to look there! I made too many mistakes losing my money to the bouncers at the bloody club—so I learned, and made my secret hideaway, and save what I need to return to the bloody Nullabora and start over on my trap lines!

But what are you going to do, when you're too old for roaming around alone out here in the middle of nowhere?  Damon burst out.  Who's going to take care of you, sir, in your old age?  What then, mate?  Have you got any money saved for that eventuality?

Ismail grinned, drew a glass flash out of his shirt, and offered Damon a swig.  Damon smiled, shaking his head, and the rabbit-hunter uncapped the flask and took a draught, wiped his cracked, scabbed lips afterwards with his dirty  back hand, and put the flask back with a loving pat. 

Oh, that!  Hey, luv, I donna worrie 'bout things to come—I just live now, this bloody crook day, not tomorra, mate!  I only got todayya!

He laughed, throwing his head back at his own witticism.

Damon had to laugh too.  The man's merry laugh was infectious.  Since that was about as good a explanation as he had heard from others like him, Damon wished him good fortune with the rabbits and their skins and went back to the Second Class carriage, to finish his picture taking.

He knew that the rabbit-hunter was just making a brave face for him, as both of them knew his fate:  someday, maybe not long from this day they rode the Tea and Sugar together,  his bones would lie bleaching out on the endless plains somewhere amidst the coral and salt pans and salt lakes and rocks and lizards, his death unnoticed and his grave unmarked.

The Second Class compartments were jammed, of course, presenting the starkest contrast with the quality folks in the First Class cars.

But here was real life!  Life in all its rawness, desperate need, and primitive, tooth and claw struggle, with survival of the fittest, that is, the most brutal and violent elements—just the thing he wanted for his spread on the Nullabora and its inhabitants, animal, vegetable, and human for sale to the  Imperial Geographic Magazine that featured his articles and photographs for a hefty sum.

Gazing at the compartments, Damon had to wonder how so many bodies could be crammed into such small spaces, without bellyaching!

But the reason for the uncomplaining masses was clear.  All they had to do was glance out the window to see there was no gain in making a disturbance of any kind with the train’s staff and management.

If anyone created a nuisance or threatened anyone or robbed someone, out he was thrust by the train's patrolling guards, who did not bother with niceties such as court and judge to decide the case.

Out he went—which was certain death, in a few wretched hours.

Everyone knew that—as signs in the train declared the warning against Social Evil, with a long,  itemized list of infractions that would not be tolerated. 

Women,  even those few traveling without husbands or related men folks,  were protected, as to touch any women in a way to make her protest was to earn swift capital punishment, or, if not the sword at the neck, the same thing: thrown off the train at 50-80 mph.

Damon took a group picture, wondering how he would engage any of the  men and women (he saw few children), as they were all withdrawn into themselves, avoiding conversation and eye contact with each other while they endured the long, long rail trip to the single-gauge transfer depot which served as the entry gate to the Mountains of the Moon (the notorious border country of Ratna and Heruka where people could escape the government authorities indefinitely, if they could find some means of sustenance in the free and lawless mountain towns and villages).

Damon, experienced as he was as a strongly-built individual and professional photographer, and no fool, was always on his guard, however.  He packed a Luger under his arm, just in case, someone tried to separate him from his money or even was out to terminate him in the bargain.

Justifying his precautionary firepower, robberies and murders still took place, despite the guards and the capital punishment they administered any malefactors in transit.

Seldom patrolling the most dangerous corridors, their justice was sporadic and quick but little enough administered to strike any real fear into the  worst troublemakers onboard.

In preparation to see what he was up against, he had reviewed articles on the train’s criminal incidents, and sometimes even the guards were complicit, for a share of the booty in a robbery.

You object to that?  Accuse the guards of anything for not doing their duty?  Well, they could handle that kind of complaint.  Over the side you might well find yourself flying, and nobody would return to the area to investigate the circumstance of your disappearance.

Human bones bleaching white along the tracks testified to that fact—and they weren't  malefactors thrown out, usually, they were victims of crimes committed on board the speeding train by the thugs who travelled the line purposely as a way to make a living by preying upon the lowest classes of the Imperial Herukan-Ratnan Duarchy. 

As the poor could afford no bodyguards, and the police did not much care what happened to anyone below First Class status, the bleaching bones were most commonly Second and Third Class passengers who fell afoul of somebody.

Knowing how life was very, very cheap on the Tea and Sugar, Damon took special care as he neared the walkways between the cars, where such crimes were most likely to occur.

A quick knife thrust between the ribs,  valuables seized,  and the victim was then pushed from the train, and nobody was the wiser.

Knowing all about this, but reasoning that they, as poorly-paid train personnel,  were at lowest risk of being made targets, kitchen scullery workers still took their vegetables and fruits and other  menu items out to the area between the cars, when they wanted some space to work they couldn't find in the cramped,  boiling, hot kitchen.

This was not particularly foolhardy.  Normally, during the day there was little danger of being assaulted.  But one worker, paring sweet potatoes and yams while he daydreamed about his sweet little bride to be waiting for him at Port Yosef, let down his guard a bit too much, perhaps.

The unfortunate fellow, Daniyel Modesto ibn-Quail, got his throat slit with a razor, and he and his potatoes were thrown overboard, after his engagement ring was taken and his pockets rifled for the petty cash he was carrying.

The happy, young fellow may have been proud of his being able to buy such a ring with a real topaz set with tiny emeralds (thought he didn’t suspect they were paste fakes) and shown it off maybe too much, and, well, that proved his undoing.

Ero, of course, was better situated to see the skullduggery going on than most everyone else aboard the Tea and Sugar.

The moment the train passed after the body was dumped, he maneuvered his Kater's Compass enough to allow him to land, and he  ran to the body and looked for signs of life.  Obviously, the fellow was a goner, so he heaped up sand, chunks of coral, and rocks with his hands, making a makeshift burial for the remains. 

Then, remounting his spiked transport, he flew off toward the distant train.

Aboard the train, life proceeded as usual even with the absence of one worker in the kitchen. 

The first class diner head cook was angry, though, to find his special potatoes for dinner were gone, vanishing into thin air!

He could always replace a scullery worker, they were a peso a dozen, but those potatoes?  He would have to change the menu drastically to account for the loss, though the next morning early he could make it up by boiling a new batch. 

Though he did not hear about the scullery worker's disappearance, already Damon had noticed a considerable thinning out of passengers in some compartments,  curiously where he spotted the roughest looking blokes.

Why didn't the other passengers report the killers?  Of course, there was only one reason:  they would be targeted next by the cutthroats aboard.

It was best, smartest, to keep silent, and hope to go unnoticed until they reached the transshipment center, Port Yosef, and its increase of safety by a degree or so.

Passing from one car to another, an elderly padre made his rounds, mainly among Second Class, and he included the fetlers’ carriage as well, as he  preached to everyone who would hear him the Gospel of Yeshua.  Fearless as a man in his position and calling must be, the padre knew what he could expect, and wasn’t about to run from it, if he was ever to get into men’s hearts with his saving word.

Up from the deep south, some said he was from the near defunct Argentine empire, Padre Noaik was a strange sight in his black robe, tattered dust-coat, and clerical collar and big wooden cross at his neck.

How the Tea and Sugar rationalized putting up with his ministry, he had no idea at all.  The only thing was maybe they thought a little extra religion might tame the crooks a bit and calm the passengers too, so they saw no harm in permitting him to operate, and even gave him an iman’s travel discount, overlooking the fact he was no iman of the State Church but a Catholic padre.

So, using his fare discount, year after year he rode the Tea and Sugar’s route, giving out the Gospel invitation, calling all to believe and to be saved from damnation and hell.

It was a brave invitation, to be sure, since he was an infidel in these parts, lands which were under the moon and sword of Isma, and had been for many centuries. 

But the padre did not seem to mind the stares or the hostility of some toward infidels and foreigners, or even the threats of an occasional iman passing through to collect church tithes from guilty believers of Isma,  for he was an amiable man, grinning ear to ear as he greeted people and tried to get them into conversation on spiritual needs they might have.

Damon met him when the padre came to visit the fetlers in their carriage, just as he was  going to pay them a visit too to see if he could get some pictures by standing them some free beers.

Damon, noting the padre by his garb and his Bible,  had to ask him how the Gospel was doing lately. 

Had any converts, Padre? he  inquired.

No, not this trip yet,  but there are a few onboard I am working on—they'll come bye and bye—if not this trip, then the next.  I feel it is just going to happen, I see it in their eyes, mate!  They can't hide it from me.  They're  seeking the truth!

Damon chuckled.  My, you missionaries don't give up easily, do you!  What keeps you going like this, year after year?  You might be retired, at your age, sir, and take advantage of a few of life's comforts,  if you have a wife and home, that is.

The missionary shook his head.  No, our order is completely celibate, we don't marry while we wear the Cloth,  and it is a good thing too.  You can't do what I do and have a sweet, little wife pining away at home for you, and worrying about you being out in such rough country as this,  and this keeps me from thinking that way too and wanting to get this business over with as soon as possible so I can scoot back to the lovin' arms of the good wife!  No, this is the best way for me to be!  I've lived all my life this way—and the end is soon coming—I can see the Celestial City shining just up the track!  Until then, just me and Yeshua and the Word!  My job is to meet as many people as I can, even if only once.  That way they can't say to the Lord, 'I didn't have a chance.'  I tell the lads that when I go to heaven I'm going to tell Y'shua, 'I have a whole string of boys from along the line, and they want to come in too.'  They listen to that.  I think rough men can be softer inside than a woman in some ways.  They know everything is crooked, and it shouldn't be that way.  I tell them, 'You keep on the right rails, and you'll get there.'  To me, this line is holy, recruitin’ ground!

Damon nodded, as if he approved.  I can see you do find your calling fulfilling.  It is written all over you—you're happy.  Few men can claim that—happiness and fulfilment!  You are much to be envied, padre.

Damon's eyes grew more sober and he looked away toward the Nullabora.  He drank the last of his glass of cold beer down, wiped his lips with a napkin around the glass, and set the glass on the tray of a passing waiter.

I am not certain even I could claim that, and I have everything I want and money can buy!

Padre Noaik did not miss a beat, the moment Damon admitted he was not as  assured of his happiness as his manner would have people believe.

He stepped closer to the photographer, helping him as he gathered up his gear. 

We should talk, my son, soon as you get your pictures.  How about it?  I can be of help, if you care to take the time to listen to an old Tea and Sugar man like me.

Damon shrugged.  I wouldn't want to waste your valuable time, Padre!  I have no big problems—none that I can't handle.  It's just that I feel a kind of empty feeling, no matter what I do, or how many pretty women I take to bed, or how many drinks I put away—that empty feeling nags me each time, and I can't seem to make it go away.  Have you got any medicine for that?  Now don’t think I want religion, no, I just don’t like that nagging feeling I get after the drinking, the women...

Padre Noaik smiled.  Well, now, I got just the thing for you—no medicine, but it's the real cure for the heart and soul:  the Word, Y'shua himself!  He only can fill that place in you that is aching and crying out inside you like that.  You see, son, there is a fiery judgment coming, and if you can think you can escape it by going on the way you are going, or by doing any good works to merit favor from your Maker, well, you have more faith than I can muster.  Yeshua has to take that guilt and sin of yours and uneasy, nagging feelings you have, and fill that hole in you with himself.  He only can do such a thing.  You can’t, no matter if you tried for a million years.  His work on the Cross is the only thing that God will accept on your behalf, to spare you condemnation and punishment in the hereafter.  It takes a long time for some to find it out.  I am here to tell you this.  So as soon as we can talk, I will give you all the Word you need to know, so you and Y'shua can get together and do real business! Okay?  You'll never regret it if you do!  I can promise you that, lad!

Damon, stiffening his resolve, once he had all his equipment in hand and was ready to make his invasion of the fetlers’ quarters, smiled.

Well, maybe!  You did a good job, padre!  I am almost persuaded to try what you describe so well.  But I’m not going to commit myself to any such deal by agreeing to talk again with you, right?  Now,  we'll see how this session I’ve planned with the fetlers goes.  If it goes well, then I can spare you five minutes or so.  Is that a deal?

The padre slapped Damon's shoulder.  Fair enough!  I'll pray for you, that you have a good session with that crew.  And a good session, is that you come out of this alive, with your pictures and camera intact!

Damon saw the padre wasn’t laughing and was looking at him cold sober, but he laughed. 

Thanks, I'll need your prayer then!  I hear from everybody this is a pretty rough and nasty bunch of cow-punchers!  People tell me that when they're not working, all they do is fight, drink, and fight again!  Not civilized human beings but  animals and low life—yet I am gambling they ought to give me some interesting pictures, if I can get them in a good frame of mind to cooperate, that is!

That said, Damon was about to knock, when the padre caught his hand.  You think you're dealing with gentlemen?  You bloody knock like that, and they'll give you a bloody fist in the face when the door opens.  That's just for laughs, for openers.  No, if you value your life, son, just push right in like you're somebody big and important on the Tea and Sugar line, and then just set up and start taking pictures, and boss them around too some so they respect you as a Somebody, just as they know they must respect the boss on the rancheros.  They'll not bother you much then, not at first anyway,  and think they might get some free cold drinks out of you, if they let you do your thing.  I know these boys, been working with them for years.  Most have good hearts at bottom, but they live rotten.  They don’t know any alternative!  They have to be shown.  That’s my job.  I would introduce you to them first, but they won't care a fig about your credentials, son—for if I do that, then you're just a nabob in fine clothes and got a good job and money they don't have,  and never will have, and they'd just spit in your face, then throw you and your camera out after smashing you up a bit for fun just to teach you not to meddle lightly with fetlers.  No, the only way for you is to bluff 'em good from the start, push right in like a big rancho boss, and don't let them think sober twice about you—or you’ll be sorry.

Realizing the padre knew the fetlers better than anyone, Damon's jaw tightened, then did as he was advised.  The moment he burst inside the fetler's car, Damon was  distinctly aware he had landed in a no-man's land,  a kind of zoo or even a wild animal's den, where the laws of  civilized society, even as relaxed as they were in Second Class and Third Class, did not apply at all here. 

He was on his own!  Anything could happen to him!  He could fight, he was armed, yes, but with so many, would he get out alive if he didn’t play his cards right?

First thing, the stench was enough to make him gag.  The dim, smoke-clogged air stung his eyes, and then he saw that the room was packed by bodies of young, unwashed, utterly debauched lads, most of them playing pool or drinking or  lying in vomit on the floor,  as his nose already told him.  The joint was crammed with too many bodies for that small a space, along with heaps of empty beer cans and bottles and butt cans and half-eaten meals thrown down, all crawling with flies.  Added to that,  the smell of spilled, stale bread and malt beer blending with the reek of an over-flowing toilet in the corner in a stall where the curtain was ripped and hanging so there wasn’t a shred of privacy—Damon really had to wonder how he was not going to retch and add to the filth.

Charging in unannounced like that, the padre was right, they paid him no more attention than lounging wild beasts would of the swarms of flies buzzing around the garbage and piss and vomit.

Damon nearly fainted as he drew his first breaths, as the whole scene  put out such a terrific stench in the over-heated room with the tightly closed windows it wasn’t endurable.  He’d have to be drunk as a fetler to take it.

Fetlers, just like they did in the outback rancheros,  rather than bother to go to the latrine in the carriage beyond their den, paid nature calls wherever they pleased in their carriage since the toilet was stuffed up.

Later, Damon was so weak in the knees when he at last stood outside the fetler's car, leaning against the wall, he could only be thankful he made it out alive, thanks to crossed paths with a praying missionary who knew the ropes with fetlers! 

Where was Padre Noaik anyway!  He looked around, going through the next car, but the missionary was nowhere in sight.

How disappointing!  Damon wanted to tell him how he had gotten some fine pictures of the fetlers despite gagging the entire time, and they would be worth a bundle when he got the negatives back to his studios and then sold them to the Imperial National Geographic. 

As for the Nationale Tourista Agencia, they wouldn’t accept those pictures for anything, they’d be appalled at the conditions of those savages he had photographed in their haunt aboard the Tea and Sugar.  They preferred shots of cactus in bloom with a yellow finch perched on a spine or a romantic, highly-colored sunset and a eagle flying, or some such tourist magazine garbage.

Going to his own room in First Class, he was showering and trying to clean himself of the reek of fetler's den when he felt the train slowing.  That meant one thing:  depot ahead!

His shoes  reeked of urine and tobacco, so he had to scrub them up first if he disembarked, too ashamed to set them outside the door for the steward.

What depot next was it? he idly wondered.

He didn't have his map out—so he wasn't at all sure.

He figured it would only turn out to be a miserable repeat of the last stop, a flyspeck and watering hole called Forest City?  Whoever named it that was drunk.  Except for a saloon and few scattered dwellings, it  wasn't anything more than a few thorny bushes, a lot of termite mounds, and white, salt, aluminate pans glaring in the sun for miles into the distance!

Why risk it again?  Would he bother going out now that he was feeling in urgent need of some relaxation in the diner and the adjacent  Gentlemen’s refreshment carriage, as the train's unofficial and unregistered saloon was called?

He felt a pinging sense of guilt, in that respect.  It was enough to make him reconsider disembarking for whatever the poor excuse for the town  had to offer in the way of drinks and a pretty woman?

Why bother getting all his gear together,  pulling on his clothes, and going out again?

Why not just rest through this train stop and later on pay a visit to the saloon.  He had done some real slumming to get some good pictures of the fetlers, and could take a nice little breather, couldn't he?

Yet a free-lancer cannot afford to pass up opportunities, particularly on such a long and monotonous stretch as the  Multan-Port Ulu-Port Yosef-Simla line!

He knew that, so he groaned and quickly  rinsed the scented soap off, used plenty of fine, freshly laundered cotton towels, and jumped into his clothes, and grabbed his equipment.

He got off with the disembarking passengers for what he hoped wouldn’t be another hellhole  of a Forest City.  He had taken one picture, he recalled.  It was a sight created for tourists with the branches of giant, fossil corals wired together to resemble stark, scarecrow trees.

He had just caught sight of a tattered dustcoat and white clerical collar as they vanished round a corner of the first of  few low-slung bungalows, the tin-roofed dwellings of railway workers that constituted the metropolis of Pimba, population fifteen.

Hurrying to catch up, he wasn't fast enough, he found, for the missionary was nowhere in sight when he was standing on the depot town's main street (its only attempt at a street, with many-patched asphalt that scarcely covered the desert’s gravel, clay and sand).

He could take in the entire thing with a glance, for the road stretched not quite a quarter mile to where a sandy, tire and can-strewn playground was started but not finished.  The desolation  was not quite relieved by a brightly painted red and green striped depot water tower that supplied the flyspeck railway town's inhabitants too as well.  Thanks to the depot water, they kept alive a few struggling palm trees, vegetable gardens and whatever livestock and chickens were sheltered from the blasting heat and wind of the Nullabora behind high mud adobe-walled yards.

Two of  Pimba’s houses caught his attention, however.  One was an unregistered watering hole, an illicit tavern, which the authorities winked at for a certain sum, of course.

As he was considering whether to enter or not, joining the other passengers, the door burst open.  The proprietor in a dirty apron and a swarthy upper body showing the hairy pelt of a black bear roared, was escorting by his britches a no longer solvent and paying patron to the street.

The  tavern keeper gave him a violent heave that sent him flying, then bouncing and rolling across the cement-hard ground and broken pavement.

The tavern door swung shut on the proprietor and his clientele. 

Damon went over to the fetler lying prone and unmoving, and  thought he might try to help him. 

Hey, you, are you all right, mate? he asked,  touching the fetler's arm. 

The fetler didn't even twitch an eyelid, so he asked again.

All of a sudden the fetler came back to life, but Damon's concern wasn't reciprocated with gratitude.

All he got was a curse, and  some spit, as he bent over the fellow.  He didn’t know that the fetler had lost his gun in a card game, and so Damon missed a bullet between the eyes.

Leaving him alone to lie in his wretched state, Damon continued on, wiping his face with his clean handkerchief. 

Why kick a man when he is down?  He couldn't do that—he has his own pride to think of!

Imagine that?  Spit on by such low, dirty scum as that fetler! he thought, as he went into the tavern for a drink.

What he didn't do for a good picture! 

After Damon left him, the down-on-his-luck fetler, minding his own low reserve of pride, hauled himself up and sat before the stray dogs came and tried nibbling his ears.

He then rose to his feet, almost fell over on his head, but caught himself somehow.

Brushing sand and sweat off his face, he started hobbling back toward the tavern, then paused.

His fists were clenched for action, and he had his knife stuck handily in his ankle sheath, but he decided he might wait on vengeance a bit—until he could walk better, like a man and not a cripple, that is.

Instead, he continued on by the tavern where Damon was taking in the locals mixed with the passengers, his feet stepping more or less between piles of horse droppings.

He knew the way by heart, and could find it with his eyes shut.  She had always been there waiting, with her delights to be paid for, one by one, and with no smiles and kisses and hugs either. 

Most times she took his whole rancho coupon, cashed it herself by going to the paymaster at the depot, when she took his and a stack of other fetler coupons for cashing in.

He knew she put out for all the others, just as she did him, but he tried to forget that when he was with her while a line of fetlers waited at the gate.

But would she remember all the good pay he had showered on her the last two years?  Didn't she owe him something a little bit affectionate-wise  for that? Wouldn't she now give him a little love on credit when he was temporarily down-on-his-luck and lost even his gun, which he could have pawned for her lovin’?

He had had plenty booze on credit.  He just felt he badly needed a little love right now—just a few minutes of  lovin' would do much to brighten his day.

So before Damon left the tavern, Eryk made his way to his trackside lover's domicile, hoping against hope she’d be in a good enough mood to do him one more little favor this time.  Was that too much to ask for a good customer like himself?

He turned in at the gate set in the high walled compound, knocked the set raps of a code that alerted the dragoman a patron of long standing only knew, and the dragoman opened up at once.

The dragoman's glance wasn’t so friendly this time, however, and  Eryk, even in his bedraggled, sodden state, could see that much. 

So what if he wasn’t liked here by his sorts, Eryk wasn’t deterred.

The lady home?  What’d’ya mean by that!  I think different!  Well, then, get outa the way!  I'm goin' in! he said.

He lurched forward, or sort of fell forward, then got his balance again somehow, and continued to the door.

Kicking it open, he found his old lover where she was usually to be found, laying on the low divan set against the wall.

Every chance he had when he was given leave from the ranchero, he had lain on that same stained divan with her after letting her have his money coupon or cash if he was paid in cash.

It took a few minutes of sweet-talking her, but he wasn't getting anywhere down to what he came for, not without the payment up front as she kept demanding, when she pushed him away.

She got up and went to the window, as if to call the dragoman to come and throw him out.

Wad'z the matter, babe? he said.  I came all this way, just to see you, darlin’,  and this is all I get for it?

What's the matter, you say? she echoed him.  What's the matter?  I say you're what’s the matter, you low-down creep!  You're too drunk to even walk straight!  And where's your money?  Tell me, did you bring any money, or where’s your  coupon I can trade for cash? Show it to me first! You get nothing from me without cash or a coupon!  And I’m sick of your coupons too.  I have to pay the paymaster his cut for cashing them in, not like cash on the barrel head!

The fetler tried to get up off the divan, but wasn't making much headway after a couple attempts.

Aw, don't you start that, woman!  You know me!  I pay good money!  And you forget somethin’!  You got my coupon first thing the other day and cashed it already.  You know that!  The whole thing—and you were supposed to take half, and me half.  So where’s my half, huh?  Answer me that!  So when I went to recoup that half of my coupon you were holding back on, I lost my gun at cards!  So now I got nothin’ to show for the whole six months work of bustin’ my guts breaking those fifty mustangs they brought in on the rancho!  Why treat me like some  dude off the Tea and Sugar?  I'm a—

She turned around, spitting out the words.  You're getting out of here, right now!  Don’t give me those hard luck stories!  I’ve heard so many they’re comin’ out my ears!  As for half a coupon coming back to you—nothin’ doin’!  You shorted me that much the time before.  Now anyway I smell a rat!  You're flat out busted,  turned out cold from the ranchero by your boss, aren't you?  What I heard was true then—don’t deny it, you're on the Tea and Sugar blacklist!  That last lousy coupon you earned was your last you will ever get!  I was lucky the paymaster didn’t know you were sacked, as he would have refused redeeming it.  The company will never rehire you—you're a dead man!  They were sick of paying you for the lousy work you did and the trouble you caused them all the time, no doubt.  You stinking piece of garbage, you lying little varmint—so now you come here, after pissing in your pants by the smell of you,  and you want something from me for nothing!  You think to use me like a donkey in the stable, do you?

There were other, more choice things she added to her list.

But she was interrupted.

There was a knock on the door, unlike any heard before in the house.

It rang right through from the entrance to the back room.

It startled them both. 

The lady of the house went to the door, opened slowly.  Her over-painted eyes met with someone she hadn't seen before—someone who didn’t look to an inch like a fetler, down or up on his luck and wanting a little lovin’ to brighten his day. 

A train dude he had to be.  He seemed to be a mighty fine prospect, by the looks of him, and she was interested immediately.

There still might be something for her that day that would please her, for all the trouble she had just endured with the reeking piece of garbage that was the down and out fetler!

A few minutes before, leaving the tavern,  Damon had been about to return to the train, when he took a second look down the street. 

His eyes lit on  the particular house that was high walled like the rest.  But the house wasn’t crumbled, leaning adobe.  It looked fairly new.

He went down to it.

Damon's eyes were