Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  There was a movie she had always loved called She Was the Thunder, He Was the Rain. It had been made on Malapet a few hundred years before, in the 2-D style of classics from Old Earth. It was about a Guardian who fell in love with an ordinary human, and it was based very loosely on the story of Raven and his love for Anais Six. Each time she watched it, Nova would mute her memories of previous screenings, so that it was always new to her. It always made her cry.

  *

  The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss was growing impatient. Her visits became more frequent, and more angry. She listened impatiently to her technicians while they tried to explain what they were finding inside Nova’s head. One day, when they made excuses for their slow progress she lashed them with the tip of her tail, which was sheathed in brass to make the lashing extra painful.

  Afterward, when the others had left, one of the Kraitt lingered. He approached Nova’s table cautiously, stooping to peer into her face. “You are hiding things from us,” he said. “We cannot reach them, but we must, or the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss will kill us and replace us with new males.”

  Nova felt sorry for him. It felt good to have someone speak to her again, as if she were a person. “What do you need to know?” she asked.

  “Everything!” said the Kraitt. “The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss says you were built by a lesser race. She does not understand that the programs that run you are far ahead of anything we have seen. They are even more advanced than the technology of the Neem. Since the days of the Railmakers themselves there has been nothing like you on the Web of Worlds. We cannot hope to build something like you, but that is what she wants.” The Kraitt let his black tongue flicker thoughtfully between his teeth. “They are lonely, our mothers. Other females remind them of the sisters they murdered, and we males are poor companions. I believe that the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss thinks, if she can make a thing like you but in beautiful, Kraitt form…”

  “She wants to make friends,” said Nova.

  The Kraitt blinked slowly with his transparent inner eyelids, which was the Kraitt equivalent of a nod.

  “But once you figure out how to do it,” Nova said, “I’ll be no more use to her, will I? What will happen to me then?”

  He just stood there. If he was showing any emotion, it was some lizardy one, quite wasted on Nova.

  “I’ll help you if you help me,” she said. “I assume the rest of me is around somewhere?”

  “On the floor below,” the Kraitt said.

  “All right then,” said Nova. She wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing, but doing anything felt better than just sitting there on that table like a potted plant. “I’ll unlock the information you need, but in return I want to make sure you keep me safe and get me back together.”

  The Kraitt blinked again. Before he finished, the screens behind him lit up as Nova started downloading the contents of her mind. She gave him everything except her own memories and her movie collection. She didn’t think the Kraitt had the technology to build a Motorik body, but now they should at least be able to construct a simple, self-aware computer.

  The Kraitt worked all night, his big eyes mirroring the ranks of red hieroglyphs that marched like armies of fire ants down the screens of his terminals. In the morning, Nova watched the amazement of his comrades when he showed them his breakthrough. The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss was impressed too, when she made her visit, later in the day. She listened carefully to his report, then killed him with one brutal swipe from her brass-sheathed tail.

  “It is not good to let males succeed too much,” she explained, stalking over to the table and gazing down at Nova. “It goes to their heads.” She stroked the tip of a talon across Nova’s face, tracing the frustrated tears that were trickling from Nova’s eyes. Behind her, her three daughters flared their nostrils, excited by the scent of the technician’s blood. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He was unimportant. The others understand the discoveries he has made. His work will be continued, and the others will work harder without him.”

  They did not even have names, those Kraitt males. They busied themselves at their screens, hissing with satisfaction as they saw the potential of the information that Nova had given them.

  28

  The human train arrived at the station just as the shard it stood on was moving into the shadow of another. The sky stayed bright, but the dusty landscape filled with shadows, the local equivalent of night. The Kraitt who came out of the station buildings to meet the new arrivals carried no lamps and did not seem bothered by the darkness. All Threnody could see of them, when she stepped out onto the platform, were their spiky silhouettes and the gleam of their unblinking eyes. She was not sure if that made them more frightening or less. She fought off the temptation to run screaming back onto the train, and made the little speech she had agreed upon with Zen.

  “We are merchants from the Network Empire. We have come here with valuable machines to show to the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss.”

  Zen had loaded Threnody’s headset with the translation software that his Moto friend had written; it turned her words into something he called the trade tongue and spat them out in flat, electronic chunks through a small necklace speaker that the Damask Rose had made on her 3-D printer. The speaker sounded weird and grating to Threnody, but she supposed the Kraitt would assume that was just her natural voice. They turned to each other, muttering and snarling. She waited, wrinkling her nose at the hot, filthy stink of them, thinking about the ice party on Grand Central and how much her life had changed since then.

  “We heard that your gate on Yaarm was destroyed,” growled one of the Kraitt.

  “There was a rockfall,” said Threnody. “But we cut a new tunnel easily enough.”

  “You cut it very quickly, this new tunnel,” said another of the Kraitt.

  “We have powerful machines,” said Threnody. “That is why we seek to trade with the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss, who understands the value of our technology, not with the Herastec or the Deeka, who are afraid of it.”

  “The Herastec and the Deeka are prey species,” sneered one of the Kraitt.

  “Then please tell the Tzeld — the Gekh… Tell her that we have technology to show her…”

  The technology was waiting in the rear car, on Raven’s truck. There were a lot of small boxes stuffed with random spare parts and damaged components from the Ghost Wolf, and three large crates stacked one on top of the other. In each of the top two crates was one of the Rose’s maintenance spiders, folded up and resting on a thick layer of packing foam. In the bottom crate was another maintenance spider, but this one was resting on a thin layer of foam, and under the foam was Zen Starling. He lay on his side, curled up, already starting to grow stiff, watching the feed from the Rose’s cameras, which she was streaming to his headset.

  He wished he could be out there on the platform doing the talking instead of Threnody. She sounded as if she was reading from a script, and he didn’t have faith in her to improvise if things took a turn they hadn’t allowed for. But it had to be Threnody: he didn’t trust Chandni Hansa, and the broken interface of Mordaunt 90 was too shy and vague to play a pushy merchant. Zen could have done it easily enough himself, of course, but the Kraitt might recognize him. Besides, he had a different job to do, one that meant he needed to stay hidden.

  Now one of the Kraitt was going back into the station buildings. The Kraitt didn’t seem to fear the Railmakers’ ruins in the same way as other races, and they had filled the old glass halls with stacks of freight and curtained parts off to serve as offices. The Kraitt who had gone inside was making a transmission on some device so crude that the Damask Rose could not hack it. “If it was any more primitive it would be two tin cans with a long piece of string between them,” she grumbled. “I assume the other end of the string is in the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss’s place…”

  Zen didn’t want to risk even a whisper, since he wasn’t sure how sharp Kraitt hearing was. He called
up a keyboard in his headset view and typed a message to the Rose by blinking at each letter in turn. Show me rest of station…

  The Rose sent him shots from her other cameras, then from the cameras of the Ghost Wolf at the rear of the train. The station was dusty and half derelict. Some Kraitt morvah slept on sidings. At an outlying platform was a morvah of a type that Zen had not seen before, like a gigantic silver wood louse.

  What train is that?

  “I think it’s Neem,” the Damask Rose replied.

  The insect people? Yuk! What r they doing here?

  “Trading with the Kraitt, I suppose. They like machines too.”

  Hope they won’t get in our way…

  “There’s some movement in their train. Some communications going back and forth between it and the Kraitt city, but I can’t decrypt them. Probably nothing you need to be worrying about. This is what you need to be worrying about…”

  She switched back to the original camera, the one that showed him Threnody waiting nervously on the platform. The Kraitt Stationmaster, or whatever he was, had come out of his office. “The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss wishes to see what you have brought,” he was saying.

  Threnody turned and called to Chandni and the interface, who were waiting inside the train. They came through to the rear car and slid open the big freight doors. The Rose extended a ramp so that the truck could drive itself down onto the platform, where the Kraitt were waiting to examine it. They opened the lids of a few random boxes and the topmost crate, but the stuff inside was of no interest to warriors of the Kraitt.

  Threnody looked into the rear car and told the interface, “You stay here with the Rose and the Ghost Wolf. We’ll be back soon.”

  “Yes, Threnody,” said the interface meekly. “Good luck.”

  Chandni jumped down onto the platform and went with Threnody across to where the truck waited. They climbed onto the seats at the front end.

  “This is insane,” said Chandni. “This isn’t going to work.”

  Threnody hushed her, in case their headsets translated her griping and their speakers broadcast it at the Kraitt. The truck moved past the glass buildings, down a ramp onto a dusty road. Two big Kraitt ran ahead of it, leading the way to the compound of the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss.

  Zen lay in his crate, watching the view from Threnody’s headset now. A dark landscape rushing by under a curiously bright sky, lakes gleaming on an airborne mountain as it turned like a moon just above the cactus-spined horizon. Chimneys and ventilation towers poked out of the stony ground. The gravity was very low. Each time the truck lurched or cornered, Zen’s box was bounced into the air, and each time it felt as if it would never come down again. But it did, and before long the tiled gullet of a tunnel opened ahead. The truck dropped underground, passing through a set of massive bronze gates, where it swung sideways, slowing to a stop. The Kraitt who waited there were talking to Threnody, but she seemed too nervous to reply. Chandni chipped in, telling them the same things that Threnody had told the ones at the station. Then they were fussing with the boxes, lifting one of the big crates down from the truck, arguing with the guards. “If we can’t take our truck any farther, you’ll have to help us carry stuff — no, we don’t need that one, it’s just the same as this — we’ll come back for it if your Tzeld Gekh wants to buy…”

  They were moving away. Zen caught a giddy, swerving glimpse through Threnody’s headset of the truck left alone, standing in a low, domed cavern. Then she was moving along more corridors, Kraitt hurrying ahead, Chandni complaining about the weight of the box that she and Threnody were carrying between them.

  Zen cut the headset link and heard their voices fade. He shut his eyes and lay in his box, feeling very nervous. Then he switched to another headset channel.

  High above the lizard city, the Damask Rose’s butterfly drones rode the night wind, peering down at the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss’s compound with ultrasound and infrared. The train’s voice whispered in Zen’s skull. “I think you’re alone.”

  You only think? he wanted to say, but he dared not speak aloud and there wasn’t time to type. He took a deep breath and shoved his way out of the box, closing the lid behind him as he scrambled down into the shadows between the truck’s wheels. He crouched there, looking around. The cavern was circular, the big bronze gates at one side, four other passages opening off it.

  “Take the one on the left,” said the Damask Rose. “I think I’ve found Nova. She’s in some sort of workshop on the next level down.”

  The ultrasound scans of the Kraitt burrow were meaningless to Zen, just shifting blue blurs, but the train pinged a 3-D map to his headset, with the route to the workshops clearly marked like a task in a game. He wanted to ask if Nova was all right, if the Damask Rose had told her they were coming, but there were voices in the tunnel Threnody and Chandni had gone down, and he was afraid the Kraitt might be returning. He fled down the left-hand tunnel, brushing scraps of packing foam off his clothes as he went. He was wearing the Kraitt jacket he had brought from Night’s Edge. It was too long in the arms for him, too tight across the shoulders, but he hoped that from behind, at a quick glance, he might be mistaken for a Kraitt. The tunnel had lamps on its roof, but not many, and they were very dim.

  He started to feel good. Not happy, exactly, alone in a maze full of dinosaurs, but more alive than he had felt for a while, as if his body had been craving this sort of danger. A brash, swaggering part of him thought, I robbed the Network Emperor, and now I’m going to rob the Kraitt Queen. He’d be the first human thief in all history to pull off a job on the Web of Worlds. And that circular bronze door ahead must be the one marked on the Rose’s map as the entrance to the workshop…

  29

  In the Gekh’s living quarters, Threnody and Chandni lifted the lids off their boxes. The light from softly buzzing electric lamps fell on the silvery limbs of the maintenance spider folded up inside. The Gekh leaned forward to look. She was sitting on a saddle chair, which was the only item of furniture in the big room. The floor was covered with the knobby, cured skins of enormous reptiles, and the walls and roof glimmered expensively where thousands of little disks of what looked like solid gold had been hammered into the rocky walls. More Kraitt, armed males and immature females, stood on either side of their mistress, all watching the humans unveil their wares.

  “This is what we call a maintenance spider,” said Threnody.

  “What does it do?” asked the Gekh.

  Threnody pinged a furtive message to the Damask Rose. The maintenance spider unfolded itself, carefully rising on its long, segmented legs and stepping out of the box. Some of the Kraitt hissed uneasily. One drew a curved knife.

  “It’s all right,” said Threnody. “This is a servant, that’s all. A robot servant.”

  “It looks like a starved Neem,” said the Gekh.

  “It does not need food or sleep,” said Threnody, “and it is very easy to store.”

  The maintenance spider made a few graceful, dancing movements and displayed some of the tool-arms that it usually kept folded neatly under its small body.

  “It thinks, this machine?” asked the Gekh. “It thinks for itself, like the machines that you humans make in the likeness of your own feeble bodies?”

  “It is operated by another machine, a thinking machine,” said Threnody. “The train tells it what to do, and it obeys.”

  “The train tells it what to do?”

  “The maintenance spider can perform a number of useful roles—”

  “I have been wondering about your strange morvah,” the Tzeld Gekh said, apparently not interested in maintenance spiders and their many uses. “So different from the morvah of the other prey species. I have been wondering, since you people are so clever with machines, if your morvah might be machines as well? I would be very interested in acquiring one of your trains…”

  “We could get you one!”
said Threnody brightly. “When we go back to our own Network we can purchase one for you from one of the leading manufacturers—”

  “So what you told my people at the station is true? Your new gate on Yaarm is open again?”

  “Yes,” said Threnody.

  The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss rose and gathered her leathery robes around her. She walked to where Threnody stood, leaned close to her, and sniffed. The snowflake-shaped pupils of her yellow eyes contracted thoughtfully, and Threnody saw her own face mirrored in the blackness there, appalled.

  “Why are you so frightened?” asked the Gekh.

  Threnody tried to get out something along the lines of “I’m not frightened, just overawed by your magnificence,” but her numb mouth wouldn’t form the words. “She’s frightened because she’s lying,” said Chandni suddenly. “We both are. We were made to come here and lie to you.”

  “Chandni!” said Threnody, over the rising snarls of the Kraitt.

  “Face it, Empress, this plan was never going to work,” said Chandni. “Zen Starling’s lying to us anyway — there’s no way home. We’re stuck here. So we need to make friends with someone tough, and that’s not Starling.” She squared up to the Gekh. “Starling wanted us to keep you busy while he robs you. Take a look. You’ll find him stealing that Motorik of yours.”

  *

  Zen leaned his weight against the door and winced as it shifted. The scraping noise it made echoed off up the tunnel. Only a slight movement. It was locked, of course, but that was good, because it probably meant there were no Kraitt inside.

  He reached inside the heavy jacket and pulled out the cutting device he had found among Raven’s stores. It was called a waterblade, and it looked to Zen’s eyes like a fat little water pistol. When he pointed it at the door’s heavy lock and pressed the firing switch, the jet of water that shot out of it was so fine, and under such high pressure, and so full of tiny specks of diamond, that it cut through the metal like a laser, making only a brisk, busy hiss.