The transition from the salt-spray of the Mediterranean to the dry, freezing air of the Central Asian interior happened in a blur of iron rails and coal smoke.
At the military terminus of Trebizond, the Vanguard had transferred her landing party, four tons of zinc-plated telegraph equipment, and her primary command team to a heavily reinforced imperial supply train. For six days, the locomotive climbed steady, grinding grades through Anatolia and past the Caspian shores, its cowcatcher clearing snowdrifts as the landscape flattened into gray, windswept steppe before rearing upward into the terrifying, jagged spine of the Pamir Range.
By the time the rails ended at the frontier outpost of Osh, the temperature had plummeted to twenty below zero. The air was thin, sharp as glass, and tasted of dry limestone dust and snow.
