Welcome to this week's Conductors Log, wherein our heroes expand the train and modify their glider to be piloted directly by Eyes...
The next morning I woke on my bunk, and found I was the last to rise. The train was humming along, but the sound of the engine had become so much background noise, something as normal as the sound of the breeze, or of birdsong. It was just…. there, and its absence would be terrifying.
I got up and wandered to the front of the train to grab some rations, knocking on the cockpit and saying good morning to Driver, asking where the others were. They told me to go to the glider cabin, explaining that Brains and Eyes had been going on about the Glider, and a way to deal with the latency issues we’d had while controlling it.
When I walked into the Glider cabin, I arrived to a scene of chaos, tools strewn everywhere haphazardly on the floor, and Brains, Eyes and Shooter were manhandling what looked like an airlock door into place, and I was quickly tasked with bolting it in when they had it in the right spot. Once I joined in, the whole thing moved more quickly, and soon enough the door was mounted, and I finally got to ask what was going on.
Eyes had a glint in their eyes when he explained the issue he’d been running into with the Glider - the signal from the train had a habit of degrading over distance, and that introduced latency, which had lead to us losing several Gliders. In order to get around the issue, Eyes and Brains had spent the night working on the Glider design, and now there was a snug cockpit where there had been the suite of computers which had controlled the craft before. Soon enough, the Glider was hoisted, and Eyes, with a giddy wave, vanished through the airlock door, boarding the craft.
We heard the roar as the Glider leapt into the air, and over the radio we heard a whoop of joy from Eyes as the glider ascended. He quickly came over the radio, excited, telling us there was a wagon on one of the tracks we were approaching, and suggests we hitch it to the back of the train.
He talked Driver through the process, backing onto the siding and into the wagon, and we all heard the clank as the new wagon was added to our train. We waited patiently until the readings from the carriage, now powered, read that it had warmed to a safe temperature, and then we excitedly went in to investigate this extension to our home.
It was a bit of a mess, with a bunch of random stuff on the floor, an ISO tank, some scrap, some rations. We scooped it all up and headed back to storage, Brains talking about the fact we might need a quicker way to get around the Train….