Kendra had four hundred engines, nine regions, and nineteen minutes when she stopped trying to solve it with people.
Two convoy columns will take a dispatch yard in eleven minutes if the yard is willing to lose it. Neither column can make a locomotive in another province report its own position.
Her first instinct had been to seize the regional dispatch yards and force the fleet into order from six control rooms. Vasa killed that inside ninety seconds, since a validated dispatch order requires every engine reporting from its own position rather than from somebody else's board.
The lock lived aboard the trains, and the trains were spread across a country that had stopped answering. No column of hers could reach even a tenth of them before the clock ran out.
What she needed was the thing that had always moved that fleet, which was the dispatch network itself.
