Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  “The Kraitt do not take living beings,” a Deeka pointed out. “But they do steal things.”

  “The humans are more clever with machines than Zen/Nova has been telling us,” said someone else. “We are lucky their gate has been sat on by the mountains and no more of them can come; they might have brought a second Blackout down upon us all!”

  “It’s not true,” said Zen, but he wasn’t sure which part he was denying, and they didn’t understand him anyway. He wanted to curl up in a ball and shut his eyes and block it all out. Herastec and Deeka crowded in, all talking at once so that his headset could not translate properly. Hath flapped their speaking membranes at him like faded bunting. He looked around and saw painted angels sliding by. A babble of alien shouts broke out behind him as he turned and ran, and his headset flashed confused translations at him: “Stop him let him go (untranslatable) bad strange/bad (untranslatable) where is he going?”

  Zen didn’t know where he was going; only across the tracks to where the Damask Rose was waiting. Only in through the door she opened, into the cluttered little house on wheels that he had shared with Nova for so long. Only to a seat, where he slumped, shaking, while the Rose carried him out of the station.

  “We must go after Nova,” he said after a while. He made himself stand up and go back through the train to the rear car, to the locked cabinet where Raven had stored his guns. “There’s a line that leads to the Kraitt worlds,” he said. “Can you tell which one it is? The Kraitt boss said she came from a place called Shards of something…”

  “The Shards of Kharne,” said the Damask Rose. “But think, Zen; you are alone, and my weapons are empty. How are we going to tackle a planet full of these Kraitt? How can we rescue Nova on our own?”

  Zen didn’t know. He was still shaking with the shock of losing her. He didn’t have a plan. He thought love and anger would be enough.

  The Damask Rose sent a maintenance spider scuttling ahead to alter a set of points, then started to gain speed, singing to herself one of the stirring songs she always sang when she was heading for a K-gate. “We are not going after the Kraitt,” she said.

  “But what about Nova? Don’t you care about her? They don’t even know what she is; they might damage her somehow…”

  “I think they know exactly what she is,” the train said. “I think the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss or whatever she calls herself got word somehow of the news from Yaarm a while before your Herastec friends did. I think they took Nova because they heard she was a machine.”

  “Yaarm,” groaned Zen, remembering. “How can there be humans on Yaarm anyway? Who are they?”

  “That’s what I think we need to find out,” said the Damask Rose, “before we go and do anything hasty. So that is where we’re going.”

  23

  On the Kraitt train, lizard warriors rolled Nova out of the net they had caught her in and heaved her to her feet. One put a claw-shaped knife to her throat and shoved her ahead of him along the dim, dirty, rusty carriage and through a door into the carriage behind it. It was brighter and cleaner in there. Three Kraitt skulls were displayed in an alcove high on one wall, and there was a saddlelike chair where the Kraitt female from Night’s Edge station sat waiting. She was the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss, Nova remembered. Her translation software guessed that “Gekh” was a title, like “Queen” or “General,” and “Karneiss” probably meant “from Kharne.” As for “Tzeld,” it seemed to mean “vicious,” which she supposed must be a compliment in Kraitt.

  The warrior forced her to her knees and backed away to the end of the carriage.

  “So,” said the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss. “Is it true? Are you a machine?”

  Nova looked up into the clever yellow eyes. She decided that there was no point in lying to the owner of eyes like that. “How did you know?” she asked.

  The Gekh folded her jeweled claws in front of her. A little sine wave of self-satisfaction ran the length of her tail. “The lesser races have been talking about you ever since you arrived on our Web. Some of them had noticed that you were different from your male. Different smell; different ways of moving. Many thought that you were augmented with machinery in some way. So quick at translating our languages! But now more humans have come to Yaarm, and it seems they have told the lesser races there that you are not a human at all.”

  “More humans?” asked Nova.

  “Yes. Two females and a male, they say, and they will be the last ever to venture onto the Web of Worlds, because your gate has gone. That is good — we do not want new races on the Web. But we do want new machines. The lesser races are scared of machines, but I think that such superstitions hold us back. I believe that it is our duty to explore the opportunities that such machines might bring. My own people have already made many advances, but I see that humans are far ahead of us. That is why I sent my males to fetch you.”

  “There was no need,” said Nova. “If it’s help of that sort that you need, I can help you. We can reach an agreement.”

  “You mean trade?” snorted the Gekh. “We are the Kraitt. We are the Hunters of the Dawn. All other races are our prey. What they think is theirs is really ours, we just have not bothered to take it from them yet. You have always been mine, machine. Now I have taken you. I will learn from you how the Kraitt can build machines that think.”

  How strange, Nova was thinking. Imagine sharing the galaxy with all sorts of interesting people like the Herastec and the Night Swimmers and still believing that you’re better than them. She listened to the silly rant with just a small part of her mind, while another small part wondered who the new humans on Yaarm could be.

  The rest got busy studying the Kraitt train. She could dimly sense the electrical impulses sparking through the big, weird mind of the morvah up at the front, but it was not controlling the systems in its carriages the way a K-bahn loco did. The lights and ventilators and door controls were all running on little electronic circuits, controlled by a computer as clumsy as something from Old Earth. By the time the Gekh said, “You have always been mine…” Nova had already hacked through its flimsy firewalls. Better still, she had detected a faint signal from a Deeka train. It might be too far away for her to catch, but it proved that other trains did cross whatever world this was; she’d just have to find one, and start making her way back to Zen.

  “That’s all very interesting,” she said politely when the Gekh paused. “But I’m afraid I must be going now.” She tweaked the subsystems that controlled the door. It hissed open, and wind came blustering into the car. “It’s been lovely talking to you…”

  She moved quickly toward the door but, to her surprise, the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss was quicker. The floppy leather ruff around her neck went rigid with a loud snapping noise, not part of her robes at all, but part of her. She crossed the carriage with the speed of a sprung trap, slamming Nova against the far wall. She bellowed something that Nova could not translate. The Kraitt male sprang forward to pin Nova’s arms, and more started swarming into the car. For a moment Nova felt warm green sunlight on her face; then the door she had forced open shut again.

  “You think we are stupid, machine?” said the Gekh. “We are the Kraitt. No prey escapes us.” She ran her black tongue carefully over all those shark-white teeth as if her instincts were prompting her to rip out Nova’s throat. “You will come with me to the Shards of Kharne and I shall study you. I shall examine your body” — a long black talon tapped Nova’s breastbone — “and I shall examine your mind” — the tip of the talon touched Nova’s temple — “but, of course, I do not need to examine them both in the same place.”

  She made a sharp clicking sound and one of her males jumped forward. He was smaller than the warriors, a technician of some sort. He carried tools, in particular a sharp thing like a motorized pizza cutter that made a high whining sound when he switched it on. The air around it filled with a fine mist from the water it sprayed to cool the whirlin
g blade.

  Nova could not feel pain. She could feel fear, though. She could feel panic. She arched her back and kicked, she tried to twist herself away, but the scrum of Kraitt was too strong for her. Some of the blue gel she used as blood squirted over them as the blade went to work on her neck. Sparks sprayed when it bit into her ferro-ceramic spine. She was almost too distressed to engage her emergency shutdown and damage limitation routines, but she did, and watched her body go limp and still as the males dragged it away.

  The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss picked her severed head up by the hair and carried it across the car. She placed it in the alcove beside the three Kraitt skulls. “No more escapes, machine,” she said.

  Okay… thought Nova’s head. What now?

  24

  Raven’s Worm still stood on the siding it had made for itself, just beyond the place where the spur that led to the new gate joined the mainline. The Worm was not much more than a hill now, with grass and small trees growing on it. On either side the lagoons spread their mirrors for the stars of Yaarm. Nearby, on the bright new rails, an old black loco stood.

  Zen had known that he would find the newcomers there. On the worlds he had crossed since he left Night’s Edge, the local media had been full of images of the black train. The Damask Rose had picked up crude TV pictures taken by Herastec photographers leaning perilously out of circling flying machines, and by Chmoii camera teams that had ventured close enough to capture the writing on the loco’s flank that said GHOST WOLF. He knew that it was damaged, which was why it had stopped here — although it probably would not have been welcome in Yaarm station, because the Herastec’s aerial footage had also shown what had happened to the mountains where the new K-gate had been. The members of the Yaarm traders’ council were distinctly less friendly to Zen than they had been on his first visit. Humans were dangerous, it seemed, and what was the point of being friendly to them when the only gate to their homeworlds was buried forever?

  The Damask Rose rolled slowly toward the black loco, her seven shadows spread around her in the glorious Yaarmish night. A Deeka documentary team who were camped on the shore beside the line peeked from their bubble tents at the sound of her engines and started fetching out cameras. The Rose ignored them and kept her own cameras focused on the other train.

  “It’s a Zodiak all right,” she said. (The TV images had been so crude that she had not been sure till then.) “Just like Raven’s Thought Fox,” she added. “And maybe just as dangerous…”

  “It doesn’t look very dangerous,” said Zen.

  And it didn’t. Its weapons hatches were open, but no guns or missiles targeted the Rose as she approached. And was that someone’s laundry, strung on lines between the hatch covers?

  “I am the Ghost Wolf,” it said, in answer to the Rose’s hail. “It’s nice to meet a real train here at last. Have you seen these local jobs — these biotech things? Like slugs on roller skates.”

  “I am the Damask Rose,” said the Damask Rose.

  “Oh yes, I’ve heard all about you,” the wartrain said. “Are Zen Starling and the Motorik Nova on board? My passengers want a word with them.”

  The TV pictures had shown three passengers, but Zen could only see two. The two young women climbed down out of its cabin as the Rose drew to a halt about two hundred feet away. Both carried guns, which even Zen could tell weren’t military guns but old-fashioned hunting rifles. He had already chosen a weapon of his own from Raven’s gun cabinet: a stylish Bandarpeti pistol. He took it with him when he climbed out of the train and held it where the strangers could see it as he walked along the track to meet them. A wind came across the lagoons, ruffling the starlit water into little cat’s-paws and reminding Zen of his first night on the Web of Worlds.

  “Stop there!” shouted one of the strangers.

  Zen stopped. They were both quite familiar to him from the alien media broadcasts, but he had not seen them in color before — the Herastec broadcast only in black and white, the Chmoii for some reason in soft shades of blue. Peering at the lo-res images on the Rose’s holoscreens, Zen had wondered if these two were sisters, because they both had the same spiky, bad-girl hair and scruffy summer clothes. But now that he was looking at them in real life he saw that they were quite different.

  One looked like trouble, with a hard little face like a clenched fist. The other was Threnody Noon. That stopped him as if he’d walked into a wall. He’d always felt bad about the lies he’d told Threnody and the things he’d done. He’d consoled himself with the thought that they would never meet again.

  “Is that him?” asked the short one.

  “That’s him, Chandni,” said Threnody.

  She had spent so long hating him. She had spent so many sleepless nights remembering how he had lied to her and the chaos that he had caused. She had spent so much time imagining the punishments that she would demand if Railforce or Noon security ever found him. And now she had found him herself, and she had a gun in her hands, and all she could think was how glad she was to meet another human being, and one who had found out how to survive in this strange place. It was all she could do to stop herself from laughing and crying and begging him for help.

  Chandni spat on the rails and went closer, staring at Zen.

  “So it’s real, then? This place?” she asked. “Because I’ve been having this argument with the Empress. I said it could all be some kind of virtual world in the Datasea that someone’s running to trick us. Full of monsters and stuff.”

  “It’s real,” said Zen. “We’ve been here eight, nine months. We’ve traveled all over…”

  “Telling everyone that you’re the ambassador for all humanity,” said Threnody. “That’s a step up. You were just pretending to be Tallis Noon when I met you.”

  “He does look a bit like Tallis, to be fair,” said Chandni. “He doesn’t look like an ambassador for all humanity, though. He’s too young.”

  “The people here don’t know that,” said Zen. “They don’t know anything about humans, except what me and Nova told them. At least, they didn’t, till you arrived and ruined everything. Now they don’t trust me, and they know that Nova’s a Motorik…” He hesitated. He had so many questions of his own, not the least of which was how the Empress of the Network came to be stuck here like a castaway. But he sensed that the answer to that one would be long and complicated, so he said, “What happened to the gate?”

  “The Guardians destroyed it,” said Threnody. “The Twins sent something called a Railbomb through behind us. Now we’re stuck here. The Ghost Wolf is damaged…”

  “Don’t tell him that!” said the Ghost Wolf.

  “So we couldn’t go any farther. We’d been here a few hours when this thing—”

  “This train,” said Chandni.

  “This sort of train came with creatures in it. I suppose they wanted to see what had happened. They didn’t seem pleased. The Wolf was able to translate some of the noises they made. It explained who we are, and they told us about you, and then we explained who you are. Who you really are. And they didn’t seem pleased about that, either, and they cleared off and left us here.”

  “Who’s with you?” asked Zen. “I saw three people on the broadcasts.”

  “Just the interface,” said Threnody. She looked behind her. “Oh,” she said. “He’s wandered off again.”

  *

  Beyond the place where the Worm was turning into a landscape feature, the ground sloped downward again to meet more mirror-water. Along the shoreline there, the interface of Mordaunt 90 had been piling up round, flat stones in little towers. He was still very sad about the death of his friend Yanvar Malik. The Guardians knew that humans died, of course — a human lifetime was like the brief flaring of a match to them — but it was only now that he had become mortal himself that the interface truly understood what that meant. He was in mourning for Malik, and in shock that he too was now trapp
ed in a fragile human shell. Piling up stones gave him something else to occupy his thoughts. It was surprisingly difficult to stack more than four or five. You had to choose your stones with care. The biggest went at the base, and the smallest at the top. The towers often fell down, but the interface was very patient, and some had already grown as tall as him.

  It was all very fascinating for the small colony of Hath who lived just offshore with their stalklike legs planted in the rich silt. They liked pebbles more than anything, and good ones were passed from hand to hand for hundreds of miles between neighboring Hath in the great colonies that stretched along the shores of Yaarm’s lagoons. They had never seen anyone pile them up so elegantly before. In the few days since the interface began his work, hundreds of Hath had come wading down the coast to watch. They stood in the shallows in a wide, fluttering crowd, buzzing their appreciation each time a new pebble was added to the latest tower.

  When he saw Zen, Threnody, and Chandni coming toward him, the interface said, “Oh, a visitor!” and put down the pebble he had been holding.

  Zen looked at his golden skin, his golden eyes. “Is that…?”

  “It was,” said Chandni. “He can hardly remember anything now.”

  “That is not fair, Chandni Hansa,” said the interface mildly. “I am only a fragment of my old self and no longer connected to the great data centers of Mordaunt 90. But I can remember all sorts of things.”

  “Nothing useful, though,” said Threnody. “Like why the Guardians never told us there were places like this, and how we get home again.”

  “It is true that I don’t know the answers to those questions,” said the interface, looking embarrassed. Then he cheered up, as a small Hath came carefully between the pebble towers and placed something in his hands — not a pebble, for once, but a little silvery fish thing. “Oh, thank you!” he said.