The good colonel did move the pointed part in question, and the Consul did gain considerable relief as a result. Sinapis scrambled to his feet. He stepped on Stafford once more in the process, but without malice. "We must help the injured-and there will be some," he said.

Stafford only grunted, because Sinapis was bound to be right. Derailments were lamentably common, and produced more than their fair share of lost limbs and broken bones. The colonel wrestled the door open. It didn't want to open sideways, but he made it obey. He scrambled out. Stafford and Newton followed.

Sinapis' prophecy was confirmed at once. A couple of the stokers lay on the fern-splashed ground. One was clutching his leg and groaning. The leg had a bend in a place where it shouldn't.

Consul Stafford's stomach did a slow lurch. He looked away in a hurry. If an injury like this threatened to sicken him, how would he do on a battlefield with bullets and cannonballs ripping flesh? He hadn't thought about that when he set out from New Hastings. Maybe he should have.

The engine driver limped out of the capsized locomotive. He was not only hurt but incandescently furious. "A rock!" he screamed. "Some God-damned fucking son of a bitch put a fucking boulder on the fucking tracks!" He started to hop up and down in his rage, but his ankle made him think better of it. "That shit-eating bastard, whoever the devil he was, he went and derailed us on purpose! I hope he rots in hell and Old Scratch uses his short ribs for toothpicks!"

Slow, cold certainty formed inside Jeremiah Stafford's mind. "That shit-eating bastard, whoever the devil he was, was a mudface or a nigger." He sounded as sure of himself as any Biblical prophet.

"Yes. Very likely." Colonel Sinapis nodded. "Those people are the ones with the most reason to slow us down or stop us."

Rounding on his colleague, Stafford said, "You don't say anything, sir."

Consul Newton spread his hands. "What would you have me say? I agree: most likely a slave did place a rock there to derail us. I have never claimed slaves loved us. The most I have ever said is that they may well have good reason not to love us."

"Bah!" Stafford turned away from him in disgust. That let him look down the track. Half a dozen cars after the one in which he'd been riding had also overturned. Some of the soldiers inside them were bound to be hurt, too. The cars farther back had managed to stay on the rails. Had the train been moving faster, more of them would have gone off.

Those slaves were fools, the Consul thought. They would have done better to plant their boulder farther from town, so we would have built up more speed. Or maybe they didn't know we would stop in Pontivy.

A horrible shriek derailed his train of thought. The phrase had quickly become a commonplace after railroad lines began crisscrossing Atlantis. Now Stafford was reminded of the reality that had given rise to it.

Colonel Sinapis crouched beside the stoker with the broken leg. Among other things, the colonel knew how to set fractures, even if the process was painful. Stafford hoped the army surgeons had laid in a good supply of nitrous oxide and ether. The newfangled medicines seemed sovereign against even the worst agony.

"Hold still," Sinapis told the stoker. His strong hands made sure the man obeyed. The officer nodded to the other stoker, who hovered nearby. "Draw my sword. Cut a couple of saplings. Cut strips of cloth, too, so I can splint this leg. Don't just stand there, man! Move!"

Move the other stoker did, and smartly, too. When Balthasar Sinapis told you to do something, you did it first and worried about why later. He would have made a marvelous overseer. Consul Stafford chuckled softly. What was a colonel but an overseer who used a uniform and army regulations instead of a bullwhip to get his way?

Stafford stared this way and that. No slaves in sight now. He'd wondered if they would stick around to enjoy the chaos they'd caused, but no such luck. Even stupid slaves knew better. Too bad.

And the army was going to be later than it had expected getting to the insurrection. That was also too damned bad.

The train derailed once more before it got to Nouveau Redon. This time, people-no doubt colored people-had set logs on the rails. The train was going faster when it hit them. Leland Newton ended up with a knot on the side of his head and a left wrist sprained so badly, he had to wear it in a sling.

One of the army surgeons gave him a tiny bottle of laudanum for the pain. The potent mixture of brandy and opium pushed it off to one side, anyhow. The opium also settled his bowels, which had been flighty on a traveling diet of hardtack and salt pork: army rations.

"Slaves don't love you, either," Consul Stafford pointed out to him. "No matter how splendid you think they are, they'll kill you if they get the chance."

Worst of it was, Newton's colleague wasn't wrong. Newton hadn't let that enter his calculations when he left with the army. He wondered what else he hadn't thought about that he should have. He hoped he didn't find out the hard way.

When he remarked on that, Colonel Sinapis said, "Plan ahead. Always plan ahead. It will not be perfect, but it will help."

The latest dose of laudanum had worn off, leaving Newton sore and irritable. He wiggled his arm in the sling the surgeon had put on him. That only hurt more. "How do you propose to plan against what happens in a derailment?" he snapped.

To his amazement, the colonel had a sensible answer for him: "Belts across the seats would hold the passengers in place and not let them fly about promiscuously in an accident. That would save many casualties."

"Damned if it wouldn't," Newton said in surprise, his pique evaporating. "I wonder why we don't do it now."

"Because the railroad companies say it would cost money to put all these belts into place. Because, they say, some people do not care to be closed in with a belt. Because, they say, feminine costume would be inconvenienced. And so people break limbs and sometimes break their heads, but a few cents are saved! Hallelujah!" Sinapis did not so much as raise his voice, which only made the irony more cutting.

Gingerly feeling the side of his own head, Newton could sympathize with that irony. He turned to Jeremiah Stafford, who'd come through the latest derailment unscathed. "Here is something about which the government should have its say, don't you think?"

"Not quite so urgent as a servile insurrection," Stafford remarked. But that wasn't necessarily a veto, for he went on, "Bound to be easier to gain consensus on account of that."

"One would hope so, yes." Consul Newton was not about to let anyone display more sangfroid than he did.

"A plan," Colonel Sinapis said again. "Have you gentlemen yet devised one?" He was relentless as a hurricane.

"How can we?" Newton did his best to sound reasonable. "We won't fully know the situation till we arrive. Many telegraph lines are down-"

"Slaves' doing," Stafford broke in.

Newton shrugged. "As may be. But what comes over the surviving wires is the most amazing twaddle. If you tell me the slaves are responsible for that, I shall be most surprised."

"No, no," the other Consul said impatiently. "Do you expect calm and good judgment in the middle of an uprising, though?"

"Perhaps not. Occasional accuracy, however, would be welcome," Newton said.

"Do we fight the colored rebels? Do we fight the people fighting the colored rebels?" Sinapis persisted. "Do we try to keep them from fighting? What do we do if they don't feel like stopping?"

Those were all good questions. Newton had answers to none of them. Well, that wasn't strictly true. He had his own answers. Unfortunately, Consul Stafford also had his own answers, which weren't the same… which were, in fact, as different as coal and kohlrabi.