Conductor’s Log 19: The Other Way Round

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to this week’s Conductor’s Log! Engine Room Update 0.3.5 went out on Tuesday, bringing three-way rail junctions, a full gunplay overhaul, scoped weapons, and better loot. You can read the full patch notes here, and as always, let us know what you think!

Now, on with the story….

Radio called it in over breakfast, in the voice they only have when they’re in the air. “Track splits up ahead, right where the loop starts. Somebody’s been busy.”

Driver put down his ration bar. We’d been going round this loop the same way for months because the only alternative was to stop and back the whole train up, and Driver’s opinions on that aren’t fit for these logs. Now a switch on the cockpit panel that had never done anything was lit up, waiting for an answer.

“Left or right?” he asked me.

Nobody had ever asked me that before. I pulled up the map at the supervisor’s desk. Both ways took us round the same loop. The way we’d always gone ran past the marker outside the minefield. Nobody mentioned that. I told him to take the other way round.

Driver took the curve, grinning. I hadn’t seen that since the day he found the horn.

Brains spent the morning in the Expedition Wagon with every weapon we own in pieces on the table. He said the stabilisers had been lying to us for months. They’re honest now, and Gunner took that personally. His first burst with the Rave climbed straight into the storage car ceiling.

Our newest passenger, down on one knee beside him, put three shots in a row through a scrap-metal target and looked up politely. He’s been calling them Pipe ever since. I suspect it started as revenge, but it has stuck. They’re still on his training regime, too, and Driver swears he can feel every jump from the cockpit.

The hunters came back from the workbench with scopes on the Tarantula and the Scorpion, and promptly fell out over how they should be set. The elder likes it slow. The younger says that’s how you get shot.

The other way round brought us to a facility none of us had seen before. I stayed at the desk with Pipe beside me, watching their first raid through Gunner’s helmet camera. The hunters picked off the first robots from further away than we’d ever managed, and Gunner kept to short bursts, which he insists was his own idea.

Nobody had been through this side of the loop in a long time, by the look of it. They came back with more in one run than we usually see in a week.

Radio brought the Glider home at dusk. They were halfway through their approach when the comms dropped out, and when they came back, it was the other voice. The small one. I’d never heard it in the air.

“There’s something on the glider band,” they said. “It’s automatic. It’s asking for the train.”

Brains reached the desk before I did. He read the ID off the screen twice, then took his hands off the keys.

We’ve lost a lot of Gliders out here. We’ve only ever saluted one with a bowl of soup.

I traced the signal across the map to the mountains. The comms clicked. Driver had heard it too, and the track ahead was already splitting.

“Left or right?” he asked.