Greg hadn’t expected to find a floating metal orb. It hovered several metres above the tracks, perfectly still despite the occasional breeze drifting through the abandoned trainyard. Roughly the size of a basketball, its polished shell caught the morning sunlight every so often, broken only by a handful of narrow grooves running around its circumference.
Greg stopped dead.
“…Huh.”
For several long seconds, he simply stood there staring at it.
He had come looking for Anakin Skywalker’s secret lair. Instead, he’d found… whatever this was. It could have belonged to a Tinker, he supposed. A floating metal orb certainly sounded like something a Tinker would build. But what were the odds that some random Tinker had set up shop in the exact trainyard his dreams had been trying to lead him to for the past week?
No. This had to be connected to Anakin. It was the only explanation that made any sense.
Greg squinted at the orb. “So… secret security system?”
The orb remained perfectly still, but Greg had watched enough movies to know stationary security systems were the dangerous ones. They waited, watched, and then they vaporised you the moment you crossed an invisible line.
His eyes drifted over the surrounding trainyard. There were no scorch marks or suspicious piles of ash, and that was encouraging. Somewhat, anyway. Then again, maybe the orb cleaned up after itself.
Greg frowned. No, he was getting distracted.
Whatever it was, it made his theory seem a whole lot less ridiculous. Either Anakin Skywalker lived here, or a brand-new Tinker had somehow decided the ideal place to build something like this was inside an abandoned trainyard.
Between the two, Anakin felt considerably more likely. Unfortunately, that still left one rather significant problem: getting past the orb.
Greg looked at it. The orb continued looking—well, existing—in his general direction.
“I know you’re probably armed,” Greg muttered under his breath.
No response.
“I respect that.”
Still nothing.
That wasn’t reassuring. If anything, the silence convinced him even further that the thing had been programmed to shoot first and ask questions later.
Greg swallowed. His dreams hadn’t said anything about killer robots. They probably should have mentioned that.
Carefully—very carefully—he took a single step to the side. Nothing happened. Encouraged, he took another. Still nothing. Greg let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.
“So far, so good…”
The orb didn’t move, but Greg couldn’t shake the feeling it was watching him anyway.
He continued inching around it, following the same inexplicable certainty that had guided him here in the first place. He couldn’t have explained why he chose one path instead of another; he simply knew that this was the way he was supposed to go.
It was deeply unsettling, so he tried not to think about it.
Several long moments later, the orb was behind him. And Greg resisted every instinct telling him to look over his shoulder. If it was going to blast him apart, he doubted making eye contact would improve the situation. So he kept walking until he finally stopped in front of the abandoned boxcar from his dreams.
It looked just like it had in his dreams: the rust, the faded paint, and the weathered sliding door. Hell, even the dent along one side was exactly where his dreams had insisted it would be.
Greg reached out, but his hand hesitated inches from the metal. “This is either the coolest moment of my life…” He swallowed. “…or the last.”
Taking a deep breath, he grabbed the handle and slid the heavy door open.
The interior wasn’t any larger than a normal boxcar, but every available inch had been packed with crates, machined components, tools, and parts Greg couldn’t even begin to identify. And then Greg noticed the money.
There were far more than he’d expected. Some stacked neatly, others stuffed into open crates as though whoever owned them had simply run out of room.
His jaw slowly dropped. “Oh…”
This… this had to be a treasure trove of stolen money. Nobody just had this much cash lying around, especially not inside an abandoned boxcar.
His mind immediately began racing through increasingly absurd possibilities. Maybe it was a secret resistance fund. Or conspiracy financing. Emergency escape money. Something like that.
Had Anakin robbed a bank?
Greg hadn’t yet decided which explanation he liked best when a mechanical whirr drifted across the trainyard, freezing every muscle in his body. The sound came again, closer this time. And with his heart climbing into his throat, Greg slowly turned around.
The floating orb was no longer where he had left it.