They called Marcus the Trainmaker, which he found singularly discouraging. He did not make trains. His factories forged the rails the trains ran on, the sheet metal for the carriages, the thick, heavy-hearted furnaces that powered the machines across the red earth. But he did not make trains.
His steel was solid. It didn’t move unless you pushed on it, you couldn’t bend it without being bent a little yourself. It never betrayed your trust, what you saw was what you got. And when you cut it, it bled neat little chips that could be dusted away.
He nudged the flesh at his feet with a boot. It made a small sound, like a bubbling rasp on dull steel. Flesh, well. You couldn’t say much for flesh.
Marcus wiped his hands on his jeans, leaving twin trails of brown red. The Red Planet protected its own, and here a man needed good eyes and better light to tell dried blood from dirt on a working man.
He nodded at his Foreman and addressed the crowd of workers ringed before him. There was no need to speak loudly.
“I’m a working man. I make the metal this world needs to survive. And you, too, are working men. We are each of us tools, working for each other, proving our worth every day and earning our keep. I value each of you. I take good care of you. I even brought you into my house.” Marcus nodded upwards at the domed factory, at its vaulted ceiling. A small gesture. The violence was drama enough.
A fractured moan broke the silence.
He hated the need for this messy theatre, but men of steel learned by example and not in classrooms. It was not an efficient process.
“But there’s a rot in my house.” He said at last. “I will find it. And when I do, I will cut it out. It would be much better for all of us if you helped me. Talk to Hale when you know something.”
His script finished, he nodded a second time at Foreman Hale and turned from the factory. There were still quotas to be met, contracts to be won, cities to be built, and he couldn’t let a little politics get in the way of steel. The militia had been trying to get an inside man in his operation for as long as he’d been smelting, and after the nasty business last year, after the riots and the smoke and the hunger, he’d taken to giving the ‘rot’ speech shortly after each new crew arrived. They’d been trying hard this winter to get a grip on Red Steel, and he wasn’t giving them an inch of tolerance this side of hell.
Sometimes the foreman identified a plant beforehand – if not, Marcus let him pick the weakest man. Regardless, any rats soon found themselves in a den of cats after the performance. Behind Marcus, Hale had conscripted two reluctant workers and the three of them heaved the body down into the furnace.
The heart may still have been beating, but such a creature had crossed the line between life and death hours ago. The rest was waiting.
The Trainmaker reached an arm through his rough faux-leather trenchcoat, picked his briefcase up from the dirt, slid his mask on, and started for the truck.
Steel you could remake a hundred thousand times, each new batch as good as the last. Cold spots could be reforged, defective parts melted down and reshaped. There was no waste there.
Flesh, well. Flesh you just had to burn.