The southern freight siding at Milepost Three had been transformed into a quarantine intake hall before the wheels of Hauler Zero-One had even cooled.
Three thousand five hundred people didn’t simply arrive. They dropped upon the gravel ballast in a dazed, frostbitten wave.
They were tenant farmers, charcoal burners, ditchers, and weavers from the southern border baronies. Grand Duke Val-Khorne’s cataphracts had burned their straw roof roofs, salted their hayricks, and driven them northward into the winter hills with nothing more than the rags on their backs.
Giles Croft stood on the timber loading ramp with his folding wooden ruler and a wooden clipboard, dividing the siding into four distinct zones with red chalk lines.
“Channel incoming traffic into four parallel queues,” Giles directed Captain Kenneth Drake, whose guard post guards were directing the flow with their shields. “Zone One: sanitary wash and footwear disinfection.
Zone Two: heat triage and hot liquid spreading. Zone Three: biometric logging and iron token issue. Zone Four: temporary housing assignment.”
Kenneth wiped freezing rain from his visor, his jaw clenched tight. “My lord, the people are scared.
In the Empire, when refugees gather outside a city gate, the city watch shoots them with crossbows to prevent bread riots. They expect us to drive them into the swamp.”
