The Doomsday Train moved with the quiet arrogance of something guaranteed to survive whatever the world could throw at it. Sparks flew from wheel flanges, and for a moment the only sound was the steady thrum of steel on steel — until Sunny thumbed the console and the PA crackled to life.
> [Host Broadcast: Manifest system active. Population aboard: 1,000.]
[Message queued: Host address authorized — transferring to public channels.]
He did not need theatrics. He climbed a battered crate by the hatch of Carriage No. 4 and planted his boot on the lip so the thousand faces below could find a place to rest their eyes. A motley sea of bodies shifted in the dim: men and women with hollow cheeks, children clinging to the skirts of strangers, backs bent from labor and hunger. Their clothes were layers of patched cloth and rust-stained rags; eyes were the color of ash.
The smell hit him before he spoke — a suffocating, saturating odor of old urine, sour sweat, and mildew. It clung to the metal like a second skin and seemed almost to rise from the bunks themselves. Rats scuttled beneath stacked crates; flies made the air a constant, lazy hum.
Sunny breathed it in and let it settle — he wanted them to see that he could stand what they could not. He folded his arms and spoke, quiet enough that Lilith leaned forward to listen.
"Listen up," he said. His voice carried in the tight, reeking space anyway, amplified by the train and the thousands of hollow ears. "You're on my rails now. You work the trains, you keep the train fed, the train keeps you alive. Do that — you live. Don't — you won't like what follows."
A dozen hands tightened on the thin bars that held the hatch. A ripple of hard laughter, then silence. The thousand-voice murmur that followed sounded like a wind through dead pipes: fear, bargaining, hope, accusation all braided together.
A woman near the front — her hair clipped short, the nails black with oil — lifted her chin. "We've been promised food before," she said. The words were small but edged with the kind of anger that had been practiced in rooms where bargaining was survival. "Promises don't feed children."
Sunny didn't reply with platitudes. He glanced at the train's display and it obediently spit out data across the hatch:
> [Population: 1,000 / Capacity: 1,000]
[Ration Index: Minimal. Current reserves: 2 days at reduced allotment.]
[Recommendation: Secure ore deposits to stabilize supply chain.]
He let the numbers speak. "Two days at the current rate," he said plainly. "We take the iron deposit. We work it. We eat." His eyes swept the crowd. "I'm not promising fairy tales. I'm promising order and meals if you pull through. You keep your heads down, your hands moving, and you might get something better than this."
A thousand trapped breaths shifted again. From one corner of Carriage No. 5 a child began to cry, soft and sudden, answered by the quick shushing of a man who rubbed his face like he would scrub the noise away.
Sunny signaled and the hatch grated open. Two doors down, Carriage No. 4 spilled its rot into the corridor — bunks three-high bolted to the ribs of the carriage, a narrow aisle where people shuffled like pressed paper. Buckets stood at the corners, lids never closing; the urine-dulled straw pooled and turned dark. The lights here were low and yellowed; exposed wiring cast small shadows that crawled across faces.
"These two holds," Lilith murmured under her breath, nose pinched, "are the worst."
She was right. Carriage No. 4 and No. 5 were a study in neglect: tarps for privacy that had never been washed, torn blankets used as diapers, the back wall sweat-streaked with condensation where bodies pressed for warmth. Men coughed into their shirts. A young woman clasped a baby whose ribs showed like the ribs of starved birds. Someone had painted a crude cross on the iron, as if to mark time.
Sunny didn't flinch. He stepped down into the aisle and walked among them — close enough to see how the light pooled in the hollows of their eyes. He moved with calm, filing their fears into something he could use.
"Order," he said quietly to Lilith and Dracula as he returned to the hatch. "Twenty. Give me twenty and a uniform."
Dracula grinned like he'd been offered a new toy. "Twenty? Make it interesting. Make them wear something ridiculous."
Sunny almost smiled. "Make them visible." He turned back to the hatch. "You there." He pointed to a broad-shouldered man with a curved scar across his temple — a man whose stare suggested he'd ordered worse than a bucket emptied. "Stand up."
The man obeyed, slow as a tide. Sunny picked him out one by one — not perfect soldiers, but broken men with the right look: teeth missing, lungs scorched, hands that could break a wrist or a resolve. They were the ones who would take a harsh job because the alternative was worse.
He moved through Carriage 5 like that, selecting, naming, assigning. Lilith kept her blade hand at rest by her hip, watching for resistance. Dracula sauntered through the rear speaking low words to those who needed convincing; sometimes a smile, sometimes a show of strength. By the time the hatch closed, twenty men wore crude armbands cut from discarded black canvas — Sunny's marshals.
> [Marshal Unit Created: 20]
[Duties: Maintain basic order within slave holds; report major disturbances to Host; allocate rations per Host directive.]
[Privileges: Quartering on upper maintenance deck; additional rations: +10%]
The AI's voice was the soft click of office bureaucracy. Behind Sunny, one of the new marshals — a wiry fellow with a missing thumb — looked at his band, then at the crowd. Power changed faces quickly in the wasteland; it taught people new kinds of greed.
"You have orders," Sunny told them. "You keep the peace. You keep blades away from soft throats so the train doesn't need to replace a body. You do that, you eat better. You fail, you answer to me. Don't make me find out what failing looks like."
He let that hang. It was a promise and a threat folded tight.
The thousand watched the selection like a storm watching a bay. Some faces found a fragile hope — a ration traded for labor could be enough to see another night. Others stared like dead things waiting for a release. A few hardened men in the back muttered about uprisings, about paying their own tolls, but their voices were thin and the marshals' eyes were cold enough to swallow their breath.
As the marshals took posts — leaning by the hatchways, walking the narrow aisles with the sort of practiced menace that made people fold inward — Sunny checked the train logs again. The numbers were merciless and clear: take the deposit, secure ore, upgrade the systems, stabilize rations. Find a way to complete his mission alive. The plan was ugly but simple.
He stepped off the crate, letting the PA click quiet. The stench trailed him into the corridor like a memory. Lilith's expression softened for the briefest second when she watched the woman with the baby fold the child to her breast with a desperate protectiveness.
"You did what was necessary," she said.
Sunny's reply was almost gentle. "Necessary's a word for a lot of things. Keep their bones in the world and they'll keep the train moving." He straightened. "Load the route to the mine. We don't have time to babysit ghosts."
Below decks, the thousand settled into their assigned misery with wary compliance. Above, the marshals took their posts and adjusted to belts that promised a crumb more than anyone else would get. Outside, the rails sang their metallic song.
And somewhere, under the engine's belly, the Doomsday Train listened and logged. The AI noted a new variable: Host authority, population control engaged. A slow process began: integration of people and purpose — the grim arithmetic of survival — and in the shadow of that calculation, a deeper program stirred, waiting to see whether the new host would command with cruelty, cunning, or a strange mercy of his own devising.