ICEBREAKER

Part XVIII - A New Challenge

Layton walked into the engine room to find Melanie where it seemed she had spent the last 36 hours, give or take brief periods of sleep. Comfortably leaned over the operations console, she was carrying on a quiet, one sided conversation with her engine. Speaking as though every word was necessary to keeping the engine smoothly running.

"You know," he stated, coming up behind her, "they used to put people in mental wards for doing that."

Keeping her eyes on the landscape ahead of them, Melanie didn't even bother to spare him a glance. "Doing what?"

"Talking to inanimate objects."

"As that we are currently moving down the track at 80 miles per hour, Mr. Layton, I hardly feel that description is correct."

"Maybe. But that doesn't make you look any less crazy sometimes, lady,"

Melanie gave him a decidedly unfriendly look. But anything she was going to say was cut off when a small siren emitted from the counsel.

Layton immediately took the helm chair next to her. "What was that?"

"The Trak Scaler." She replied, quickly working her fingers over the panel on the consol. "It found something."

"What could it possibly have found out here in the middle of this lovely little patch of nowhere?"

Melanie looked up, scanning the area in front of the train. "Obstruction on the track."

"How is that possible? We're the only obstruction on this track currently."

Melanie shook her head. "It's just starting to send back information. It was running some miles ahead of us and is now headed back. It must have just come into range."

"Screaming all the way?" Layton asked, a slight worry in his tone.

"In a manner of speaking. It's job is, after all, to alert us to any problems. So it's basically performing it's function."

Layton waited as Melanie read over the data coming in from the Trak Scaler as it plowed it's way in reverse down the track back towards the engine.

"It looks like it could be just a large amount of snow piled up on the track." She finally reported.

"And that tone says you think otherwise."

Melanie turned to him. "When the trains first started running, people were still able to survive outside for a few more months. As it got colder, and people started to lose their fight with the freezing temperatures, it made them all the more desperate as heat, food, and other essentials became scarcer. But those that were still alive, saw the trains running and knew that they were their last chance for survival. So they did anything they could to try to stop them so they could secure a place on board."

"So what? They set up blockades?"

"Exactly."

Layton leaned back in his chair, a less than serious tone now in his voice. "Yeah. That makes sense. Risk derailing the train to try and get on it."

"People were desperate, Layton. You saw what it was like at the train yard when Snowpiercer departed. Utter chaos. People stampeded over each other to try and get on board. They just wanted to live. And when people are that scared, they don't think straight."

"So now what? We can't go forward and we can't go back."

"We go through."

"Through?"

"We do what Icebreaker was built to do. There's little a handful of people could have constructed on the tracks this engine can't go through like it was paper."

Layton glanced towards the back of the engine. "So I guess we'll be saying goodbye to our little friend out there then."

"What do you mean?"

"The Trak Scaler. The poor thing is running headlong into it's destruction."

"Don't be insane!" Melanie quickly spoke up. "I wouldn't risk losing one of them. Their too valuable. Even more so since this is the only one we currently have."

"But there's nowhere for it to go than right back at us."

"Exactly as it should."

Layton gave her a confused look, but Melanie ignored it as she got up from her seat. "The Trak Scaler is coming in at approximately 90 miles per hour right now. It should make contact with Icebreaker in about ten minutes." She stated, moving to a back console.

Layton started to follow her to see what she was planning on doing, but she stopped him before he even got out of the helm chair.

"I need you to be the eyes on the back of the train." She stated, pointing to the camera screens set up in the engine room. "Letting me know what the Trak Scaler is doing as it approaches."

"You mean aside from exploding into a ball of scrape metal as it collides with the back of the engine?"

Melanie leaned around the clear screen she was sitting next to to give him one last disapproving look before turning back to the control panel she now sat in front of.

Within a few minutes Layton called out to her that he could see the small dot on the tracks, making for them at a high rate of speed as he watched it projected on a screen from one of the rear cameras.

"It should start to decrease it's speed." Melanie called out.

As he watched, Layton acknowledge back to her the Trak Scaler was indeed slowing down as it approached the engine, but hardly to what he thought was a safe speed for it not to collide with the engine. Although he did estimate at this speed it would simply be pushed off the track without much damage and maybe that was the plan. That they would be able to come back for it one day.

But as he was formulating his own ideas about what the Trak Scaler's eventual end would be, his attention was pulled to another screen, where the camera showed a more expansive view of the back of the engine. As he watched, a large door in the back of the engine began to slide up, opening a space easily large enough for a semi-truck to drive itself into comfortably. Once the panel was fully retracted, a small ramp extended, a track built into it that matched the width of those on the track they were currently on.

Layton watched as the ramp lowered itself to the tracks. Almost instantly the little Trak Scaler seemed to sense it's escape and made a beeline for the ramp, hopping up over the small bump onto the ramp and scurried quickly into the back area of the engine.

"All on board?" Melanie asked from her station, a pleased smile on her face.

Layton gave a slight "Yeah." in response, still amazed at how easily the whole operation had gone, and all in an effort to preserve one small Trak Scaler.

Getting up from her station, Melanie returned to the helm as Layton watched the ramp retract back into the engine and the outer door close again.

"It should be easier to get information from the Trak Scaler now with it on board." She stated. "Icebreaker can extract information from it directly and hopefully give us some idea what we are headed for."

"What if this isn't some small problem?" Layton asked. "What if this turns out to be another train car left behind by Wilford? Or something just as solid?"

"Then we will deal with it." Melanie answered casually.

"How? Just...run it off the rails?"

Melanie continued to work over the controls. "More or less, yes."

She turned back to her roommate's exasperated sigh at the answer.

"Layton, this is what Icebreaker was built for. To clear the tracks for the other trains. I can assure you it is perfectly capable of handling just about anything we would encounter."

"Regardless of the fact that we are not 'heading' into anything, we're 'backing' into it?"

"Regardless." Melanie answered.

Several minutes later, Layton watched on the camera mounted in the back as they approached the section of the track the Trak Scaler had indicated was where the obstruction was. As he watch, a large wall of snow appeared in the distance, growing steadily larger as they came closer to it.

"It's definitely not solid." Melanie commented as she scanned over the information coming over the engine's control panel. "It's more...like a structure."

"So it could possibly be a blockade?" Layton asked.

Melanie nodded. "Most likely. But they did an impressive job of it. My question is why. Why build something like this out here? On this track? And where did the materials come from? This was a depopulated area by the time the trains began to run. People were concentrating in the cities. Not out on flat, desolate plains."

"Like you said. To stop the train. Maybe this was meant to be a surprise attack. Or give them extra time to try and put up something more solid."

"But this wasn't a main track, Layton."

"Maybe the plan was to somehow force the train off the main track onto this back track."

Melanie shook her head. "This still wouldn't likely stop a small truck, Layton. They must have known that. We've hit numerous blockades with Snowpiercer over the years. While they didn't stop the train, they certainly made their presence known. This...this is like..." But Melanie abruptly stopped in her speculation and was suddenly out of her chair, flicking several switches on the overhead panel, then grabbing the lever on the control panel.

"FULL STOP!" She yelled even as the train began screeching over the tracks, all wheels underneath it straining to answer the reverse command as the train continued to slide over the frozen tracks towards the large mound in front of it.